Last update: 11 September, 2016
Walt Disney was fired from the newspaper he worked for due to lack of creativity. To get on with his life, he founded his first animation company, Laugh-O-Gram Films. After some time, it turned out to be a real failure, but then, eventually, he came to Hollywood and the cartoons of him started to have great success.
"I can't believe that there are insuperable obstacles for those who know the secret of making dreams come true"
-Walt Disney-
There are many stories like that of Walt Disney. Each of us in our life has experienced moments of failure after which it was necessary to make corrections and start again. Success, failure and learning are part of our daily life, they are the foundation from which we grow as people. For this reason, in life it is written, erased and rewritten.
What it means to be successful in life
What does success represent for you? Being important at work, being happy in life, feeling good about yourself and others, traveling the world, having money and luck, a family, a partner, children, work and health?
"90% of success is based on persistence"
-Woody Allen-
Regardless of the meaning it may assume, getting what success in your vision gives you confidence, it pushes you to move forward, ultimately it makes you happy. Elsa Punset, writer and philosopher, daughter of the Catalan science writer Eduard Punset, refers to these cases with the definition of "winner effect".
When we feel like winners, we generate dopamine and this makes us feel better and more ready, which will allow us to try our best and overcome the challenges that arise. It is equivalent to saying that being successful leads to even more, like a ripple effect.
Learn from failures
To understand how success and failure work, we tell you a curious fact: according to some estimates, 90% of the products that land on the market fail. Failure, therefore, is not the exception, but the general rule. However, this is frowned upon.
Knowing that failure is the most common outcome should make us think about how to live with it more naturally. Psychologist Carol Dweck relates the way we deal with failure with our concept of talent.
"Failure is the opportunity to start again, with greater confidence"
-Henry Ford-
There is a view that sees people's talent as something innate, that is, that you have it from birth or nothing. However, according to another perspective, talent develops on the basis of perseverance and efforts to get what you want.
People in the first group face challenges as a form of demonstration of their innate talent and thinking that failure presupposes not having enough skills or aptitudes. As a result, they fear and can't stand the idea of ​​not achieving their goals.
However, people who think talent is part of a development process see failure as proof of their efforts, from a positive point of view. Failure is a way to become stronger and better: if you don't fall, you don't get better.
Learning from failures and taking risks in life takes a lot of courage. Not everything will always come out well: we will go through many disappointments, but our real success will be learning, maturing and growing. Think about what makes you happy, what makes you smile, then fight for it.
Emotional intelligence and success
In the book "Emotional Intelligence", published in 1995, Daniel Goleman cites several studies in which observations were made of the lives of various young people who had scored very high in the intelligence tests.
In these studies, the satisfaction levels of these young people were compared with concepts such as happiness, prestige or career and it turned out that the conscious part of the intellect accounts for approximately 20% of the factors that determine success.
The remaining 80% depends on variables such as luck, social class and, above all, emotional intelligence. Self-motivation, the ability to persevere, the management of moods and empathy, therefore, are more determining factors than intelligence.
“In life you don't win and you don't lose, you don't fail or triumph. In life we ​​learn, we grow, we make discoveries; it is written, deleted and rewritten; you weave a canvas, unravel it and sew it again. "
-Ana Cecilia Blum-
