Success and failure..they're just events

 

I have a question for you. Why do we judge people on how successful they are?

We all do it even if it’s a subconscious thing. We look at a homeless person on the street and in our minds we conjure up how we see them.

We see a guy collecting trolleys in a supermarket car park and come to a decision about him.

We watch as a bin man collects our rubbish and empties it into the lorry and have an opinion on them.

We see janitors and cleaners and come to an assumption of the person.

Even when we think we don’t, we do. It’s human nature. It’s the way we’re brought up whether we think so or not.

We look at the executive climbing into his Mercedes or BMW and we think we have them tagged to a certain position in life.

We look at friends and family and see how they’re moving on in the world and we judge them by how big their house is, how new their car is, what kind of holidays they take what schools their kids go to.

We look at the celebs with their super lifestyles and we do the same as we do with our family and friends, we make a decision on where they are, defining whether they’re a success or a failure.

It’s something to do with the way we look at the world. But in every case we’re wrong. And here’s why I think so.

Success and failure are not what people are. Success and failure are just events in a life’s journey.

The executive who gets a promotion isn’t necessarily a success. The promotion was. It may be that the person’s so engrossed in their business life that they’ve neglected their family to achieve it. If that’s the case I don’t see the person as a success.

The lowly paid road sweeper may be viewed as a failure. However, he may have a loving family awaiting him or her when they get home. They may have a relationship with their spouse that makes them smile and laugh together on a regular basis. I wouldn’t see that as a failure.

If you look at the rubbish collector as less than the high-flying executive, just wait until your rubbish collection isn’t done for a month or two. You’d soon realise who would be more important to you.

In regard to my own life, I’ve learned that whether I’m a success or not has nothing to do with how high I’ve risen. I’ve had periods of my life when all has been going swimmingly, when I’ve been earning good money and holidaying in far-flung places. Was I a success then?

How about when we lost my business? When I was in the council offices day after day telling housing officers that me and my family would be on the street in the matter of days as we were about to lose our home due to events that were out of control? Had I become a failure then?

When I look back at the times, I sure felt like a success when all was going well and definitely felt like a failure when it wasn’t.

But the truth is that when all was good, I wasn’t a better or worse person – the events leading up to it were successes and when everything went wrong, it was the events that were failures.

I was still the same person. My values and ethics hadn’t changed. My thinking and my actions may have done. But who I was hadn’t.

As I’ve got older, I’ve learned that people aren’t successes or failures. Our conditioning has led us to think it is. Our upbringing and the people surrounding us, along with the media have helped to make us look at people in that way.

But when you strip it down, it’s the events and actions that are what are the successes or failures. It really isn’t the other way around.

Don’t get me wrong, all of us have fallen into the same way of thinking about it.

However, I’ve learned as I get older, not to beat myself up when things go bad and not praise myself up too much when things go well.

Sure, when I’ve worked hard, applied myself and things have gone well, I’ll pat myself on the back and think I’ve done well, but I know I’ve also often worked hard and applied myself when things haven’t worked out so well.

When my business fell apart, it wasn’t because I’d stopped working. I was working as hard as ever. Circumstances beyond my control happened and situations meant that what I’d been doing no longer was getting the results they had been.

And when I lost everything, I felt like a failure. But I wasn’t. Mind you, the events that happened certainly didn’t help.

And sometimes, things have gone wrong for me because I’ve made the wrong decisions along the way and I’ve beaten myself up and thought of myself as a failure. But once again, I wasn’t a failure.

I learned things that made me stronger, I learned new things along the way to help me to grow and move on once again. The event of my failing lead to my understanding and then progressing toward another success.

Success is a pervasive thing. It turns heads when it happens. I’ve certainly done it internally too. When I was younger I can remember thinking that I was the bees-knees when things were going well. That’s why I felt so bad when things went wrong.

But let’s take a step back a moment. We’re all going to make wrong decisions. We don’t wake up in the morning and think to ourselves, “It’s a great day to see if I can cock everything up and wreck everything.” Of course, we don’t. And yet, we all do it at some stage. It’s how life is.

The fact is, we make our decisions based on the knowledge we have at the precise moment we made that decision. And sometimes, we don’t know enough. The truth is, it’s often we don’t know enough.

I’ve never learned anything from any of my successes in life. When it’s all honky dory, I’ve learned to be aware.  That’s when things can go wrong. When you start to feel as though you’re a success, you can take your foot off of the pedal. And if you do it too often, that’s when things can trip you up.

But I can honestly say that when I’ve failed, that’s when I’ve learned those life lessons that have made me uncomfortable. It’s at those times when I’ve had to look inward, see where I’ve gone wrong, think about what I needed to learn and then adjust, and start again.

The things that happen to us are what shape us. Our ego is what makes us think we’re successes or failures. And when we think we’re one or the other, it’s about perception. Compared to whom? Where’s the baseline?

My vision of who is successful could be completely different from yours. It’s the same with failures.

I’m friends with people who on paper are millionaires. You can look at them and see the trappings they have around them and consider me to be a failure alongside them. In fact, in the past, I’ve done the same.

For me, that changed one day with a conversation with one such person.

I was a Director of a non-league football club back at the beginning of the 2000s. I’d been co-opted onto the board after a meeting of directors.

I remember one day, going to a Board meeting and looking out at the Director’s car park. There were brand new or recent Jaguars, Mercedes, BMWs and a solitary 10 year old Vauxhall Cavalier in there. Guess which one was mine.

During the meeting, a contentious issue arose and it was being discussed. As always money was being talked about. They were going around the table discussing how much money they’d recently put into the club and how much they needed to put in. And they were sharing thoughts about the situation as they talked.

Eventually, the conversation came around to me. I was embarrassed about being involved as I didn’t have money to put in. I replied that based around the fact that as I had not and did not have any money to invest into the club, I shouldn’t really have any input into this situation. The meeting continued and I have to say I felt like a fraud and that I shouldn’t be there.

At the end of the meeting, the Vice-Chairman of the football club, a partner in a multi-million-pound engineering company with good Government and Ministry of Defence contracts, came over to me and asked that I dropped by his office the next day to see him.

I did and thought that I was going to be asked to leave the board. It wasn’t the case.

He told me that he understood why I didn’t want to get involved in the conversation about the money, to which I said that I didn’t feel I had any right to contribute because of my financial situation.

He then proceeded to tell me that I should have no need to have been worried to share my thoughts. When they’d invited me onto the Board of Directors they knew I wouldn’t be able to contribute financially to the club.

They’d invited me onto the board because I’d shown in the previous two years how much I’d contributed to the club, firstly when I’d joined the Supporters Club and also as Chairman.

They’d seen the amount of work I’d done to improve the club. How I’d used my signwriting skills to brighten up the snack bars, how I’d cajoled supporters into helping decorating the lounge areas.

How I’d led the Supporters Club to raise a record £44,000 during the previous year, funds which directly input toward the main club funds. How I’d come up with an idea of converting a room into a bigger snack bar, got a team of people together to do the building work, how we’d raised the money to pay for it and buy the new equipment to kit it out and how the new snack bar was now making more money than it ever had.

They’d noticed how not only I was working around the club, but I’d enrolled my wife and my two boys to man the snack bar on opening days.

And it hadn’t gone unnoticed how I’d offered to take over the task of writing, compiling, typesetting and getting the matchday programme produced with two days notice when we’d lost the person who’d been doing it, abruptly.

He then went on to tell me that because what I and my family did around the club, my opinion was greatly valued, that the Directors felt that what I did made me as worthy to be on the board as they were and that they were well aware that while the other directors all ran businesses that could continue when they weren’t there, they knew I was a sole trader and that when I was doing things for the football club, I wasn’t able to run my own business.

He told me that I may think I’m a failure compared to them, but that I was equally as important to the club as they were and the other Directors said that because I didn’t have a big business, my perspective was different to theirs and how I saw things was different from theirs. That’s what made me valuable and appreciated as an equal on the board.

I went home and thought about it that night and realised that the only credit I could take from the conversation is that I never give up and always try.

I wasn’t a success because the Supporters Club raised that much money. I may have encouraged and come up with ideas, but the success was because all of the committee of the supporters club pulled together and did their bit to help the club. The combined efforts produced the success.

I was on the board because my efforts got me noticed. It was the efforts that made me successful in becoming a director.

The credit I’ll take is in following what’s known as the circle of success. I’d thought about something, put ideas forward, which we’d given a try, and then tried something else. Some things worked, some things didn’t, but we kept going. The more we did, the more things worked and in the end, we were successful.

Unfortunately, though, the circle of success works both ways. As I said earlier, you can sometimes be successful because of the things you did. You’d become motivated by following the process.

Then, when you stop doing the things you’d been doing, motivation drops. And because motivation drops, you do less, and so your motivation drops again.

And as your motivation drops, you procrastinate. You stagnate. You stop getting ideas, you stop thinking positively, and you end up back where you started, or sometimes worse off.

And the only way you can get better again is to keep doing. And it’s in the doing that you get the success.

So you see, all those people we see who we think of  as successes because of how we perceive them aren’t really. It’s the events themselves that were successful.

And to be honest, if you learn from the failures, and keep at it, you’ll get more successes.

At the end of the day, we honestly don’t need to judge ourselves or others as successes or failures.

Most importantly, the only really important thing is how you see yourself.

Me, I’m a work in progress. I’ll not be finished until it’s over. Sometimes I have successes, sometimes I have failures.

If I am anything, I’m a trier. I don’t give up, I try to do the best I can. Sometimes, I win sometimes I lose, but I never throw the towel in and accept defeat. I keep learning and I move on.

I try to be kind, helpful and honest hardworking and respectful of others. That’s good enough for me.

It’s up to you how you see me. And it’s also up to you how you see yourself.

Don’t let life’s lessons ever make you feel a failure, because you can learn and move on. And by moving on you’ll have more successes and that will bring you hopefully, to where you want to be.

Do the best you can, give it your best shot. It might work out, it might not. You won’t be a success of failure either way.

But you will respect yourself and feel good about yourself when you know that you’ve done your best.

And at the end of the day, that’s all you really need.

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