To each walk of life there is a concept of success peculiar to it. Success as an Olympic high-jumper is not the same as success in business or academia. It is accordingly hard to give a general definition of the concept, the more so because one person’s view of it might not be shared by others endeavouring in the same arena. For example: one high-jumper might see getting into the Olympic team as success in his sport, while another regards getting only a silver medal, and never the gold, as a failure.
As this suggests, there is an element of subjectivity in the concept because it is so allied to one’s hopes. This can raise a problem: if hopes are allowed to metamorphose into expectations, the resulting view of what counts as success is easily distorted. If one’s expectations are sufficiently low, one can be a perpetual success; if too high, a perpetual failure.
But success is not wholly a matter of subjectivity. There are objective criteria in any field where outcomes can be measured to show advance over an earlier stage. Interestingly, ‘success’ once literally meant ‘outcome’ and only came to mean ‘favourable outcome’ in modern times. It now implies outcomes which are positive, and usually highly positive: it suggests the gain of wealth, status or both, and with them the acclaim of others.
This is what most people think they want, although there are better kinds of success which do not bring the burdens that can accompany status and money. People who achieve quieter forms of success in their chosen doings tend to be more secure in their enjoyment of them. Only consider: the person who becomes very rich might have to employ bodyguards for fear that his children will be kidnapped, while the person who becomes famous is sure to become a literal prisoner of her fame, unable to do so simple a thing as visit shops in the high street, at least without being stared at and followed by photographers.
These inconveniences are no deterrent to aspirants. For them the great question is, ‘What is the secret of success?’ There is no shortage of sage answers. Keep on trying; regard every failure as a stepping stone; ignore the jeers and catcalls that greet your efforts; remain loyal to your dreams; make your own luck; never forget that the greatest failure is not to have tried at all.
All these familiar pieces of advice are true. The more cynical among us claim that it is equally true that many lives have been wasted in futile and misguided attempts to ‘try, try and try again’, or to relish failure and regard it as a guarantor of future achievement. But this cynicism is misplaced. Nothing we do in life is wasted, even the failures that are not stepping stones to success. This is not a paradox. He was wise indeed who first noted that endeavour counts just as much as outcomes. For it is not what we get but what we become by our efforts that really counts in life, and becoming something happens whether or not we win the prize which, or so we believed, lay at the end of our strivings.
Mark Twain, an accomplished cynic, once offered a recipe for success: just combine ignorance with confidence. The mixture often works well. Not knowing the likely difficulties beforehand, and full of assurance about overcoming them anyway, a breezy entrepreneur can succeed where better informed and more level-headed folk would not dream of venturing. The nice thing is that when such a person succeeds, he instantly changes from being an idiot to a genius; which encourages any others still hesitating on the brink of adventure.
Somerset Maugham remarked that it is wrong to think that success spoils people by making them arrogant and egotistical. His own experience, he said, was that most successful people are kind, tolerant and humble. This is a striking observation, and one that is often proved true. Partly it results from the fact that most success is built out of the bricks of failure – or the bricks that other people threw, as someone once drily observed – and this makes successful people sympathetic to the trials and difficulties of others.
‘Success is not final,’ Churchill said, ‘and failure is not fatal; what counts is the courage to continue.’ None of the many pieces of advice about trying to succeed is as good as this. One reason is that it contains a warning: that success is never quite the end point one expects it to be. The glow of success invariably fades; a higher peak becomes visible from where one now stands, and new ambition dawns; the feeling of achievement is temporary. ‘Nothing recedes like success,’ some joker rightly said.
If there is one sure lesson about success it is that its main point is not success itself but the effort to achieve it, for what one gains by the effort is the really lasting success. It is long after we have experienced what we thought was failure that we recognise this lovely and heartening fact.