Who to blame for our success?
“Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan.”
We tend to overanalyze our failures to narrow down to one singular moment or decision that decided our fate. Generally, it isn’t about one decision but a collective stack of decisions that make us who we are and decide our destiny.
We never tend to do the same exercise with success. Nobody likes to narrow down success to one singular point except in sports, where it is most common. In life, we like to rest the laurels on our shoulders and place the blame for failure on someone else. If failure is an outcome of a collective stack of wrong decisions, then success must be the opposite. But for all practical purposes, that’s not how it usually works.
We have often seen outliers who achieve success by making a few right decisions. Startup founders and successful seed investors get rich by investing in one or two key companies that become super successful. There are people who make many wrong decisions in life and yet end up in the right place because they made one or two decisions that transformed their lives.
If you inverse the logic, it is exactly how failure works. One or two major bad decisions and you end up losing everything. Like Napoleon’s Russian expedition. Wellington, be it in India or as part of the seventh coalition, was at the right place and right time to defeat the already battered and outnumbered French army to become the one who defeated the great Napoleon. Make no mistake, Wellington was a capable military general. But his success didn’t come after an arduous struggle.
In the end, success is much like failure if you don’t care about the outcome. It is the impact of the outcome that decides whether our choices were good or bad, ergo success and failure. Barring a few fundamental choices in life like focusing on health, education, and building systematic wealth, there isn’t any formula for future success.
So, how do we achieve success? The truth is there isn’t any formal method to achieve success. We are all trying to find correlations among successful people in the world to find causation. We want to believe that if Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk wake up in the morning, it must have a positive impact on our lives. We can only cover the fundamentals of our lives and be indifferent to whatever happens.
We can stand tall in the face of adversity; we can fight our sorrows; we can try to become the best version of ourselves. But in the end, there is no guarantee that we will be as successful as we dream to be. We can become successful, though. And if you really try to look for it, you may also find a pattern to becoming successful. But there is no guarantee that it will produce the same results.
Just because you follow the same path as your predecessors doesn’t mean you will reach the same end.
Success is the inverse of failure. Any choice can become the high-impact choice of your life, resulting either in devastation or revitalization.