Imagine for a moment that you’re sitting down in front of a prominent news personality. Say Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather, (yes I’m that old), or the current news anchor of your choice. They are there interviewing you and they ask you, “Tell me, how would you define success?” What would your answer be?

Would you think in terms of financial success? A certain net worth accomplishment?

What about success in your personal relationships? What defines success when it comes to the relationship between a husband or wife, or a parent and child?

What about physical success? A certain athletic ability or accomplishment? Running a marathon? Achieving weight loss to get to your ideal body weight?

An internet search on definitions for success returned the following results:

· The accomplishment of an aim or purpose · The attainment of popularity or profit · A person or thing that achieves desired aims or attains prosperity

There are probably many accurate definitions for success, as varied as the number of people answering the question.

At the direction of a mentor, I sat down some time ago, and wrote out my personal definition of success. For me success revolves primarily around my relationships with those closest to me in my life.

There is a general definition of success however, that I have come to recognize, and one that may seem counter intuitive.

Success is a series of failures.

Failure does not seem like success. Failure does not feel like success. Failure is the opposite of success. How can a series of the opposite of something be the definitions of its antithesis?

Good question.

If we can get to a point of mental and emotional maturity sufficient to recognize that some of our greatest lessons in life are learned by our failures, then every failure becomes an opportunity for some of our greatest successes. Put a string of those together and we have the opportunity to excel far above the person we would otherwise be, if we hadn’t experienced any failure at all.

Most of us go through life trying to avoid failure. We fear failure, or the possibility of public embarrassment because our failures are visible to others. That fear stops most people from trying things that they don’t know if they can do successfully or not. To me, that is the real definition of failure; not trying because we’re afraid we won’t be successful.

The next time you’re faced with the choice of attempting something that you want to do, or feel like you should do, but you’re afraid you may not succeed, do it anyway. If you succeed, fantastic. If, by chance, you do anything less than that, then take the time to think about what went wrong, and how you can do it differently next time, in order to be successful.

If you will do that, you have just changed your failure to a success. In that way you can turn every failure into a success.

Here’s to your future failures!

To see how well you’re doing overall in your personal development, take this two minute quiz to check your success (or failure).