There is a thin line between failure and success. This is true whether you are talking about sport, business, education or every day life. That line is so small as to be almost invisible at times. I enjoy the spiritual writings of Paulo Coelho and he might well say that there is no line at all. A quote of his comes to mind when thinking about Success and Failure.
"There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure."
Oftentimes we can build things up in our heads and make them mammoth and insurmountable. This may be self created, handed down from parents or a societal "norm" that we have been conditioned to accept. It is inherent in certain people to accept this and not strive to break down these perceived boundaries, while others will do everything in their power to have a go anyway and try to prove others wrong. That inner strength can sometimes be the difference between success and Failure.
On the topic of success and failure, an expression comes straight to mind. I am unsure who coined the phrase, and that is not important right now. I do remember ex Irish Soccer captain Roy Keane using the expression when describing Ireland's training set up and equipment ahead of the Fifa World Cup in 2002 in South Korea and Japan, which was a shambles. Let's have a look at the expression first and then dissect it a little bit.
"Fail to Prepare, Prepare to fail"
What a great expression it is. If you don't put the time into preparing or training, how can you expect to succeed? It's simple really, isn't it? Let's take an example.
Imagine that you are in a foreign city, let's take London as an example, and you need to get to someplace. To do so, you need to make some sort of a plan. You can pay for an expensive taxi and outsource the knowledge required to navigate the way to this destination or you can get the tube and use your own intuition to navigate, which will involve finding your starting point and destination on the tube map and figuring out the quickest and most efficient way to get there.
You would not just walk into the nearest tube station and get on the first train that comes and expect to arrive at your destination, would you? Yet in life, business and education people sometimes do just that. They have not defined their desired destination, so how can they ever expect to get there and what's more, how can they know how to navigate towards it with incremental small steps?
That brings me to my second point, which is this. So often failures or lack of success across a myriad of areas occur simply because we have an innate tendency to want something straight away, instant gratification. We are conditioned by some parts of our life which are able to function like this such as fast food deliveries, Uber taxis or Netflix streaming, but of course the bigger more important things in life are not instant, we have to work at them.
In this modern age, people almost expect things to happen for them, just because they want them. It doesn't work like that folks, unless Mammy and Daddy are loaded and they set you up. For everyone else hard work and graft is the key. You have to be willing to roll up your sleeves and graft.
Graft alone is not enough though, you also need to have some sort of plan or target, otherwise how can you expect to achieve anything?
I play golf competitively and at the start of each year I set some targets, for example this year, I want to:
Now I have something to strive towards and I can plan my practice around these goals. This makes things much more meaningful and at the end of the year, I can see how many I succeeded with and determine how successful my year was. The alternative is to go out every week and just hack around the course and see how it goes. That's what I used to do and is it any wonder my handicap hovered between 19 and 22 for so long?
The photo above is a shot of me chipping a ball into the second green at Glenlo Abbey hotel - I got it up and down for the par, in case you were wondering!
Another thing the springs to mind here is people trying to boil the ocean. They basically decide that they want to become a great footballer or a competent chef or a computer programmer and they go hell for leather for a week and at the end of the week they give up, as they feel they are not as good as they wanted to be after one week. They have fallen into to one of life's pit falls. Unless you want to fail, don't bite of too much, instead write down your goal and then break it down into 10s or 100s or even 1000s of micro goals. When added together these micro goals will add up to your overall macro goal. Realistically this is going to take months or years, not just one week.
The great thing about breaking down a goal like this is that the micro goals seem very achievable and you can tick them off as you go and gain some confidence and a feeling of achievement as you go.
I am going to wrap this discussion up now and I will leave you with this thought. Don't ever be afraid to fail. Think of your favourite person in the world, maybe it's your Mum, your son, your Auntie. Think of your favourite sports person. Think of your favourite artist from Bob Seger to Lucian Freud, from Miguel de Cervantes to James Joyce. Think of your favourite business person from Steve Jobs to Radia Perlman. Let me tell you something about them all, with absolutely no doubt or exception, they all failed and failed regularly, but they all had the conviction to keeping trying and so some of those failures turned into successes. That is life folks, we need to dust ourselves down after our failures and remember to celebrate our successes.
How do you feel about success and failure? Have you any advise that you can share with the rest of us or any real life stories of either? I would love to hear about it in the comments below, or better still write a Weekend Experience post like this and tag me and I will read it.
This was my entry to 
@galenkp/weekend-engagement-writing-topics-week-150
I must say I really liked the quote that accompanies this week's post too:
There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.
Have a think about those words from Jean-Paul Sartre, pretty profound stuff, and a reminder that life is fleeting and time waits for no man or woman.
The images used throughout are all my own
