Enemy of Success

Let me ask you a question at the start of this blog. What is the enemy of success? Please read carefully; what is the enemy of success? If your answer is failure is the enemy of success, I want to encourage you to re-think the answer because the biggest enemy of success is past success! We carry the success that we got earlier in our life for a long time with us.

Suppose you cracked a very difficult interview and got the job, and now for a long time you are very pleased with this success. But now if you don’t focus on your performance, how long do you think you will last at your job? Or suppose you received a rank in the first five in your 10th standard, 12th standard, or during your graduation and went with this mindset for your job. Instead of learning new skills required for your job if you kept yourself in the glory of your rank as a student, my question is, how long do you think you will last at your job?

Or suppose you start a new business, you received revenue beyond your expectations, maybe in crores, and instead of thinking about sustaining or even improving this success for the upcoming year, you focused on the joy that you received from this success, how long will your business last?

My point is that your past success is the biggest enemy of your future success.

This does not mean you should not celebrate. When you get success, for one day, one week, you must enjoy that celebration. But the time period we give for that celebration should be one hour, one day, one week, or even say one month at the maximum. Beyond this set time period, you should not celebrate, because if we kept cuddling the earlier success, we are reducing the possibility of the new success. Look at an example. If Virat Kohli starts to score only one century per year, how much respect will we give him? If he scores a century, a half-century, or gets a really good score in every match, then only he will retain his captaincy or position in the Indian team of cricket.

After scoring three goals in a game, if Maradona or Pele would not have scored even a single goal in the rest of the games, do you think they would have reached the position in their careers that they were at? They made their careers only by performing consistently in every match, and celebrating their earlier success but simultaneously training for future success as well.

So, my first question was, what is the biggest enemy of success? The answer is past success as I told you. Revisit this thought. In order to get new success, let us decide on a celebration period and celebrate with 100% involvement in that celebration period and then immediately start preparing for new success. I am also with you in this journey.