Learning From Your Successes

I have never been good at learning from my failures. I often find myself unable to do anything about them or even avoid them. I still have all the habits people told me I should let go of since I was a teenager: being extremely shy, reading more than interacting with people and being too straightforward, It's almost like my habits picked me and not the other way round, and I have no power in letting go of them. So learning from my failures caused by those habits I need to get rid of is probably my greatest failure. But I learn, and daily too. Just not from my failures but from my successes. I learn to repeat my successes.

image: mindsetdaily.com

I frequently examine my life and pick out the things going right and the things not going right. I try to be as objective as possible. And always there are a lot of things going right and a lot of things not going right in my life. But I have a path I'm heading, a life-long goal I'm after; and it's very clear to me. I know when I'm no that path and when I am not on it.

Usually, my failure and success are the sides of the same coin. The same personal attribute that make me successful at one thing makes me fail at something else. So each time I focus on fixing the cause of my failure I often damage the cause of my success. An example was in 2012, I tried to fix my being unsocial. I got down all the things social people do and that I was going to do. I joined a lot of social and networking groups, attended events, joined in the small talks and tried to blend in anywhere I went. It was a disaster. Not the results, as I was visibly progressing and even getting accolades from my friends who noticed the new me. The problem was the effect it had on me. I wasn't feeling at all like me. I was always getting too tired everyday from talking (which gives me headache), listening to discussions that headed no where and running around with no aim beyond just being more social. Then it opened me up to other risks I didn't consider. I'm not good at turning people down, even when their request is clearly exploitative. That year I got exploited thoroughly.

What I do about my failure and success, which I see as the sides of the same coin, is to try to get the effect of the success to be more than that of the failure. I consider the failure as the sacrifice I have to make for the success, so I simply focus on getting a very big success that will make the sacrifice worth it. I try to learn from my success and come up with ways of repeating them on a bigger scale.

Ultimately, I see fulfillment as achieving my goals (which are the constituting pieces of my life-long goal) in spite of my failures rather than by getting rid of my failures.