Two steps forward one and a half back!

To be honest I can’t think of anything I have done in my life that hasn’t failed at some point, and all but the most fortunate of people will say the same. What I don’t think happens is what is suggested by this prompt. One failure doesn’t lead to future success. That only happens because you are forced into a change of course. 90% of the time that change of course will lead to more problems or to you making no progress. In a sense, this ties in with the prompt the other day about fate. If we ‘notice’ a failure leading to a success we are pretty much guaranteed to be imposing a structure on our decisions in retrospect which definitely wasn’t there at the time. We say to ourselves that we reacted to A, put B in place and it turned failure into success. Actually what happened 90% of the time is that we took another punt and this one worked out. This is why I am incredibly suspicious of the ‘role models’ with their 10 steps to success. All they do, to my mind, is retrospectively impose a narrative on a series of unconnected decisions. The sooner you realise that you are only in control of about 10% of what happens to you in life, the easier life will be for you.

Yes, take a chance on things but if they succeed remember that you got lucky and that if you had made the same decision a month earlier or a month later it would probably be added to the long list of your failures.