I’d Like To Redefine Success & Failure.

We’ve come to think of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ in opposite terms.

Success is good and is rewarded, failure is bad and frowned upon, to be avoided.

I’ve lived through both, in a single stream of events, and those terms are no longer relevant, or realistic, or even truthful in my experience.

Is it time we redefined these concepts?

Is the idea that hard work is the secret of success a lie?

I talk to a lot of people who’ve worked hard and failed.

Including myself.

Our society today urges us to work hard, to aim for success, to start our own business, to accumulate wealth and own property, make investments, acquire assets and generally set our sights on success.

And those who do succeed in achieving those goals are rewarded.

But aim for success and fail, well, bad luck, you’re pretty much abandoned.

Then you join the ranks of the so called losers, the dole cheats, the failures, the couch potatoes, lazies who they say make little effort to make something of their lives.

Is this another big lie?

Thankfully I live in a country with an excellent welfare system that provides a basic safety net that was enough to keep me alive when my life crashed and burned. I’m grateful for that.

But I was still living below the poverty line which is unsustainable if you want to lead a decent life.

I aimed for success . . . and failed.

Starting from a government housing estate I aimed for success.

Ten years later I was running my own freelance copywriting business from my home, an original 100 year-old Victorian house in a fashionable inner suburb of Melbourne.

I worked hard, often 7 days a week, sometimes working all night and fronting a 9 o’clock meeting next morning, fresh as a daisy.

Another ten years of working hard later the success bubble burst.

And I wonder, is success merely a bubble that sooner or later could burst?

I went bankrupt and lost everything.

It cost me not only my own freelance business but my home, my health, my marriage, my kids and my livelihood.

I was on my own, left to survive as best I could.

Which I did, because with the right attitude, deciding to live and not quit, going with the flow of my passions and following my inner voice, I had an adventure which sustained me in ways I could never have imagined.

So much for your goals of success (and the rewards that come with it) and the misinformation about failure..

So here’s the good news about failure.

Could it be that failure is not failure at all?

Has the time come to regard failure as described in the old terms, of having to be abandoned and labelled a loser, a dole cheat, destined for a life of poverty, as the new success?

If only more people thought about it like that.

Even Napoleon Hill in his bestseller ‘Think & Grow Rich’ went to great lengths to point our that ‘rich’ was not about wealth per se, it was more about the riches in life that are important.

My immediate response to bankruptcy was to head for the hills and live in a friend’s old caravan parked by the roadside in a small country town in the Australian bush with nothing.

I lived there for 5 years which became the start of a whole new life that was not about success . . . by the old definition.

I set out to heal myself and my stress-related issues and I became the real me, the person I’d hidden under a layer of false self for so long.

I want to urge you to question whether your life is based on aiming for the old ‘success’ . . . or the new ‘failure’ . . . which is the new ‘success’..

So I’m wondering, what if there was no such thing as failure any more.

Are we just following bad advice for something that doesn’t always work out?

They say that you need to fail at least once before to achieve success.

The title of a James Bond movie is: ‘You Only Live Twice’ and I believe it.

Is that the secret to finding success or failure?

But then, isn’t that all part of the adventure that is life?

Don’t refuse the adventure, urged Joseph Campbell.

You can read my story in my book ‘Back to the Wall’ HERE.

Or read my author biography on my website HERE.

Good luck.

Neil

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