The title is the first half of a well known saying: “Success has many fathers, failure stays an orphan.”. A bitter statement, but quite true at its core. When your enterprise fails, you and you alone will be blamed. Does your enterprise succeed, then many people will claim that you didn’t get there alone and that they contributed greatly to your success.
But if we are really honest then we have to concede that there is a lot of truth in this saying. Especially the first part. Success really has many fathers, although we will not always acknowledge the fact. It feels very good to contribute success to your own endeavours. I did my best, I worked hard and all this hard work led to my success so all the credit should come to me. Alas, this is only partly true. Of course you are entitled to be proud when your hard labour leads to good results. But do not forget that on the road to get there, there have been others that were there when you needed them. Both directly involved in what you were working on, as prior to or in the side-lines. People whose advice you took, colleagues that helped you, customers who provided the opportunity for you to excel. And don’t forget the century long build-up that created the society you were born in and live in. The concept of writing was conceived, that made it possible to communicate ideas, which eventually made education possible, so you could go to school and learn a trade. Civil engineering made it possible for you to live warm, dry, with water running from the tap and a nice clean sewage system. Power plants provide us with energy. Governments created infrastructure such as roads, railroads and canals, made healthcare possible, put a justice system in place, and so on. Things you don’t (or rarely) consider, but without which you could never have gotten where you are today.
So your success is never yours alone. And rightly so, because every medal has a flipside. Just as much as your success isn’t yours alone, neither is your failure entirely your fault. Contrary to the saying from the title, failure also has many causes. One such cause, and not the least one, is coincidence. But when we consider other people we can say that, in the same measure as the support of others helps you to be successful, will the lack of such support (led alone people who actively try to sabotage you) lead to failure on your part. Not everything that happens to you can automatically be construed as your fault. Your attitude towards success and failure therefore needs some rethinking. In other words: do not be too proud when you succeed, but, more importantly, do not judge yourself to hard when you fail. Things you don’t control play a much bigger part in determining the fine line between success and failure then you can imagine.
History shows that more often than you think people are praised for accomplishments that are actually not theirs, and the other way around. Examples? Watch the short summary of the life of Thomas Edison. He invented the lightbulb, the telegraph and the gramophone. Or didn’t he?
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