Existential Psychology
How To Achieve Success
Even when you find success you will recognize that many factors completely outside of your control had to go your way for things to work out. The relationship between skill and luck is a tangled mess and is sometimes difficult to tease out. The fact that external success is dependent upon variables outside of your sphere of influence can give you a good perspective when you are confronted with life challenges.
Even if you fall short of the mark and fail to get the desired result, if you know that you activated the very best of yourself and did everything you could with the factors that were under your control, then pride and triumph will take their rightful place next to feelings of disappointment.
In an existential sense then, success means you have willed your Self to work at its full capacity in order to achieve an end. In the course of your efforts, you are sure to build upon your skills if you stay with whatever you are doing, and you will be different at the end of the process than you were at the beginning, regardless of the measurable external result.
If the real goal of life is continued human development then a loss is still a win when you give everything you have to an endeavor, because you will have grown in important ways and will have further developed abilities that put you in a better position to confront new challenges.
People sometimes don’t take enough time to think about everything they have learned when they fall short because they are caught up in the bitter emotions of failure and just want to put the whole experience behind them. But like we said, if you do everything you can do to will a desired result, you have nothing to feel bad about since there was nothing more you could have done.
But often people don’t give everything they have and deep down they know it. These are the people who are quickest to cite the external factors that led to a bad outcome so that they can wash their hands of the whole affair and move forward without any guilt. This attitude insures that you learn nothing and it will stunt your growth. The price you pay for comfort is stagnation.
Whether the result is success or failure, the real questions to ask yourself are if you were consciously aware of all of the areas where you were capable of influencing the result and if you gave everything you had in these areas. If the answers are yes then you achieved success.
