How To Handle Success
In this Motivational Monday Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, shares an interesting perspective on how to handle success.
Lot’s of people talk about who to overcome failure but we don’t hear about how to handle success very much (which is strange because if you continue to overcome failure, you WILL reach success!).
The interesting thing she points out is, she realized that great success in some ways felt like her early years of great failure. And the way she handled the failure is the same way she learned on how to handle success.
The key for her to keep on keeping on was to find a place where she felt “safe” and “At home”.
In other words, they way she learned to handle failure was to go back and dive into her passion, her love, her creative art of writing. And she used the exact same technique on how to handle success.
Now, you may be thinking to yourself, “Why would anyone need to learn how to handle success?”.
And she simplifies it with one very clear statement that says:
“Failure catapults you into the blinding darkness of disappointment. Success catapults you into the equally blinding glare of fame and recognition”.
And both of them take you out of your center, your “home”. So it makes sense that to productively deal with both and to learn how to handle success, you look to how you handled failure (because 99% of the time failure is the precursor to success).
And it all really comes down to a simple piece of wisdom that says the best way anyone knows how to handle success or failure is if you get knocked down 99 times, get up 100 times.
Just keep creating, keep doing what you love, find your back to the love of what you do/did that created that success.
Because that’s how you handle success and productively and effectively grow into the person that can retain that success.
Make Life An Adventure!