In my teens, I used to believe being successful meant you had to succeed the first time every time and that was one reason I respected my uncle. He always seemed to make it through tough times. But later I learned that my uncle had failed his final exams twice prior to being an engineer, the genius of a man had failed so many times but I never saw that part. For years I had seen him as being exceptionally gifted and talented.
Experiencing a poor performance can be very hard on anyone no matter your threshold for pain and disappointment. There was a time when I had a poor performance in front of an audience at work last year and I actually felt the cold silence fill the room as the audience felt how uncomfortable my performance made them. I instantly wanted to give up, actually I did, for about 3 days, until it dawned on me that my rent was due and that was more important than my being so hard on myself.
The difference between being a successful person versus an unsuccessful person is not that a successful person doesn't fall down, it is that a successful person continues to get back up even when it seems ridiculous, even when they are exhausted.
What distinguishes successful people from other people is their stubbornness and denial of allowing one bad chapter to define their story.
Someone once told me that failure is merely information, and while I don't completely agree, failure definitely still hurts. Regardless, there is merit to the concept. The man or woman who continues to persevere despite failures did not have fearlessness through failure, rather, he or she had some type of internal fear of failure, and but pushed through their fear of failure and kept going.
I have no idea, but perhaps what we perceive to be great may not be as noticeable as we think it is, that's why greatness should not just be looked at based on the number of times someone wins, rather, the greatness of a person will show once they have actually experienced adversity. Greatness is truly measured by the number of times that they show up the next day to perform despite not having performed to the max of their abilities previously.
