Enough successful people will tell us that life is a marathon, not a sprint. And yet most people live their lives as a series of successive sprints, often more tired starting the next one, than they were the prior.
Look back at your school days, and you’ll realize that many folks who stood top of their class have not made it as far as their potential would have probably suggested at the time. Why could that be?
Perhaps it’s the case of the “golden touch” as one author put it. If we start out successful, then the potentially misplaced confidence in our own abilities skyrockets. We think that we are solely responsible for our own success, and don’t believe that something like luck aka extraneous factors even exists.
Others are often too scared to even try. As my Guru often notes, success is nothing but repeated failure. However, failure that comes from not even trying is not what he’s talking about here. We (me in particular) need to be bold and venturesome. Not timid and close-minded. Failure of the courageous type is nothing more than a synonym for learning.