Success Isn’t a one-way street
Day 12 / 365
We’ve all heard of one-hit wonders, people who achieve great success in a short amount of time, only to be followed by failure.
What makes success so hard to sustain? According to Richard, the speaker of the above Ted Talk, the reason is that a lot of us think of success as a one-way street.
We work hard to get to success. Once we get there though, we get in a comfort zone. And we no longer put the efforts in doing the same things that got us up there. That is what happened with Richard as well. He got too comfortable, he stopped improving and decided just to sit back and relax.
Before he used to put his work and his clients above money. But once he was successful and got rich, money became more important to him.
He no longer did things that he was once passionate about. Although he wasn’t into management, he still did it. As he thought that being the president of his company it is what he must do. All this had a bad effect on his mental health.
I was outwardly very successful, and inwardly very depressed
Success is a continuous journey
Casey Niestat, a YouTuber who I admire a lot, has a video that sums up this talk for me
Life is like walking in the wrong direction on a moving sidewalk
Stay still and you’ll fall behind
Walk slowly and you’ll stay right where you are
To get ahead, you must run
That’s the mindset we must have if we want to avoid the success-to-failure syndrome. Keep working hard, keep improving. Success isn’t a one-way street. It’s a continuous journey
This story is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here
Up next — The Road Not Taken