When I think of success, most of the time I think of some final or pivotal moment, frozen in time. Someone has a new fancy car, a nice house, is having their picture taken on the red carpet. It's a lot of glitz and glam. It makes me feel that failure is messy, but success is clean...pristine. It's cool and collected.
Success is just as messy as failure though, because success is only achieved through those messy failures. The first time you bake a cake, or try to ride a bike without training wheels, chances are you struggled a bit. You probably fell down, overcooked the cake (or possibly broke it when removing it from the pan), and made a mess.
It's easy to think that reaching a goal is what makes you successful. Reaching a goal is great, and part of being successful, but in reality it takes ongoing work--and messes--to keep being successful. We have tons of decisions to make in the course of a day, and even more so when we're doing projects or trying to forge our own path. Messes show that we're DOING something, we're taking action to reach our goals. There's no shame in that, just as long as we clean up the messes we make along the way. ;)
I'm curious, what does "success" mean to you? Do you also usually think of success as one special moment, like finally getting your dream car?
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