Failure or Success?

In our society, we have come to classify people into one of two categories: either you’re a failure, or you’re a success. It’s really simple, you’re a success if you have material things, and you’re a failure if you don’t. But throughout the years, I have come to question society’s credibility on determining whether an individual is either a success or a failure. I will show you how both failure and success are not what you are, but who you are.

To give you a glimpse of what Webster thinks, I have the dictionary’s definition of both success and failure. Just because it’s easier, let’s take the word success and define it. Success is: the favorable or prosperous termination of attempts or endeavors. Please keep in mind the key words that make up this definition: favorable, prosperous, termination, attempts, and endeavors. Now let’s look at the definition of failure. Failure is: an act or instance of failing or proving unsuccessful; lack of success. Oh my goodness! Look to me as if failure has a lot of success wrap up into it! How do I come to that conclusion you say? I’m glad you asked that question because I’m going to show you how. Look at how many times success was mentioned in this definition. So just judging by this definition and nothing else, I would conclude that failure is just being successful at not terminating favorable or prosperous attempts or endeavors!

Now let me appeal to my skeptics who are asking themselves ‘how did she come to that conclusion?’ Let’s say you have someone who starts a business. This person has worked very hard to save money to get their business started and off the ground. Spending endless hours walking the streets to post flyers because they don’t have money to hire anyone to do it for them just yet. Well after all their efforts, the business is costing more to stay open than making money and the very ambitious business owner runs out of both money and energy and thinks of closing the business down. Is this a failure or success? Ok let’s take someone we all know named Harland David Sanders, founder of KFC. Before he started his restaurant chain, he drove across the country offering his fried chicken recipe to restaurants, in exchange for royalties for each dish sold. He had over 3,000 rejections before his first sale! After maybe 1,000 rejections, how many of you would have thought of him as a failure?

So you have a story of both a success and failure right? Before you answer that question, let me finish the first story for you. The business owner decides to seek advice from another successful business owner before finally closing the doors to the business. They soon found out that they were advertising in the wrong areas for their business. The business owner took the friend’s advice, took out a loan, and the business is now flourishing!

In conclusion, I have come to define failure and success as such: failure is not seeking advice and or not getting back up after falling down and success is learning from your mistakes and not repeating them! So you see, both failure and success are a state of mind; if you state your mind as a failure, that’s what you’ll become, but if you keep it on learning from your mistakes, then you are already successful!