The biggest impediment to being successful may be something you find surprising. No matter what field you’re in, or what you consider success to be, achievement of any kind comes, to some extent, through learning. Those at the top of their game have learned what they need to know to do it well. Whether they learned formally or informally, through life experience or in a classroom, they have learned, and they have put what they learned into practice. But success does not last. The successful person today can be a failure tomorrow, or at least not as successful. To remain at the top of your game, your knowledge must retain its relevance to changing circumstances—and everything changes. If we don’t change with it, we will fade into irrelevance. Take fiction writing for instance: The modern approach to fiction writing is, to some extent, a response to the excitement level of the novels’ big competitors—movies, TV, video games and social media. It’s harder to hold readers … [Read more...]
The big F word
It’s a nasty word that F word. No one likes to hear it, especially if it’s being applied to them, but sometimes we just have to face facts and admit that we have failed. Of course, we can’t fail unless we have some measure of what success means, and the higher our idea of success, the easier it is to fail. Aiming high is a risk, but if we don’t aim high, we may be limiting ourselves. Failure is subjective. One person’s idea of success may be another’s idea of failure, so on a mental level, we can sidestep it quite easily by changing our idea of success, but on an emotional level, it’s harder to wriggle away from. Warning: the rest of this post may be uncomfortable for some readers. Last night I felt like a failure and it was a strange feeling, kind of liberating in a way because once you’ve failed there’s no where lower to go, but it’s also a heavy depressing feeling especially if you consider that the last five years of your life just might have been a waste of time. Generally, we … [Read more...]
