On the other side of success

As you grow in life, and if you have a fair evaluation of yourself, you will realize one thing.

Most of your success is luck, than you.Not all of it. Most of it.

Most of your success is luck than you.Not all of it. Most of it.

If you were good then you would have kept on trying to create opportunities and realized that most of these opportunities wouldn't encash. They would just keep on passing you by. But some of them stuck, and you made the most out of it.

Of course, you don't say this to anyone, but it's your inner secret.

In your heart, you know that so many things could have gone wrong. Some of them did, but somehow, just as the game was about to end, a glimmer of an opportunity came by and you grasped it and made the most out of it.

Have you felt something similar? You are not alone.

Successful people are humble because they know

This is why you see a lot of successful people draped in humility. They understand that success is a disloyal mistress. It comes on its own and it goes out on its own. All you can do is keep trying all the time, and sometimes the returns will be zero and sometimes the returns will be disproportionate.

This is why you also see a lot of politicians at temples. Because they get it. They will do everything possible in their power to win that election, but still, that doesn't ensure winning. Religion is one of the things that promise success, and so they pray.

And then there are the successful ones, who will tell you with pomp and show how all their success was theirs. They will tell you that they planned it and made it happen. Not true, they are just faking it. They think success attracts success, and all is fair in love and war. Trust me but they too know, that success is fleeting.

The best you can do with life is let go of 100's of bad things that are thrown at you, and don't miss that one shot that matters.

The best you can do with life is let go of 100's of bad things that are thrown at you, and don't miss that one shot that matters. Keep your eyes open, be watchful and attentive, have patience. You will get that shot. Just don't drop the ball.

It's that simple.

For new graduates

But if you have just started working, the same success might play out differently for you.Sometimes it happens that you get good breaks early disproportionate to your capabilities. You keep on trying to upgrade your capabilities to match your success, but at that moment, before you have upgraded, you feel insecure.

Just as most of our knowledge is classified by researchers into labels to let them dissect and talk about it, this phenomenon also has a name. Its called "The Imposter Syndrome".

Illustrating "Imposter Syndrome"

let me illustrate this with an example. Suppose you had a 9 CGPA as did many of your classmates, but you managed to land the cushy job and they didn't. How would you explain it?

The moment such a thing happens, the first feeling you will have is "Wow! i was lucky". Then your mind will create reasons enough for you to believe that it was because of some unique quality. Most of us cant handle "being lucky" as a good explanation when reasons like "I am good" is around.

Then you would go ahead and internalize that credit as your own and start behaving like you think you ought to.

But time and again, your capabilities will bail out on you, and you will find yourself in situations where you just don't know what to do. You will feel out of place with a lot on your plate and not enough teeth to chew with. You will feel like an imposter who is faking more than what you are.

How do the smarter ones manage early success

Smarter ones will at this stage get a mentor so that answers are just a call away. Others will immediately hit friends, books, videos, Google and deep bouts of introspection to quickly learn and internalize newly grasped knowledge and force themselves to upgrade. Both kinds will make it. You will know them as young achievers.

Others lacking introspection will think of this success as their own. They will keep faking it, acting like a winner, till they are found out and over time be re-calibrated to their real position. These people will keep living in the past, in those glory years and tell their story and how world is unfair or they were unlucky to anyone who will listen.

For ones who are just plain unlucky (Or so you feel)

No one is unlucky. If you feel that there might be two reasons

1. Your expectations are not based on reality: It happens all the time. It happens with people who have been made to feel good by supportive friends, bosses, and families. Hell breaks loose once reality strikes and gloom sets in. Or you might have taken credit for an event internally which either had a flash of brilliance from you or you won by fluke and you promptly set your benchmark there. No harm in doing that, except, being able to do something once is not a good way to create a benchmark for life. So my suggestion would be to re-assess yourself. Talk to friends and family to understand what is it that you are missing.
2. You missed an opportunity and can't get over it: If you are one of those who missed an opportunity or failed due to some mistake, wallowing in self-pity is not going to do it. Blaming others is also not going to take you out of misery. That might just be what psychologists call displacement (blaming something unrelated as the cause). The best approach when you don't see a window of opportunity is by writing on paper. Pick up a pen and paper and plan things out on paper. If you have a goal, write it on paper, and try to list down how will you achieve it. This is a simple trick which will help you think clearly.

This segways into an important aspect of success, that is managing failure.

How we accept failure

If it is important to chase success, it's equally important to understand failure and how we accept it. We accept failures mostly by distorting reality to make it comfortable and manageable to us.

This reality we create is reassuring and not in conflict with our self-image. This happens in many ways and if you understand how it's done, then I hope you will sometimes be able to check yourself from doing that.

1. Denial: This is the primary defense mechanism where you refuse to accept that you have failed. You will blame others, blame God, the timing and the team for why something didn't happen. You will accept partial success as the complete success and many other things just to avoid confronting the truth that this is not what was supposed to happen.
2. Displacement: Simply put you take out the anger of your failure on unrelated people. Ever felt that " I am in a foul mood", well, displacement in the making. very close to venting.
3. Rationalization: If you find yourself saying the equivalent of "he had it coming" and "She provoked me" you are rationalizing your actions by creating a reason that looks like cause and effect.
4. Projection: When you project your feelings of insecurity as the basis of actions from others. So if you have failed, all of a sudden it starts feeling like everyone is treating you like a failure. You don't like your coworkers becomes "They hate me"

There are more of these like Regression, Reaction formation, Sublimation, and Repression but they are all kind of passive or similar to above in their manifestation.

I hope you like what you read. This subject is too big to be dealt in a single article, but most of the things I wanted to say are here.

Thanks for reading, i know this one was a little longish , But now your turn to write (Comments).

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Views expressed here are my own and don't reflect upon the views of any of my employers, present or past.