Dear Readers,
Thank you for coming here!
There is an old Chinese saying: Failure is the mother of success.
This saying is among the most frequently used quotes to encourage people to keep faith and never give up.
It also carries sound logic because failures allow us to learn and improve and therefore set the basis for success. Many would argue that failures are the best means of learning.
However, it recently came to me that the reverse is also true.
Success is also the mother of failure.
Success makes people confident. And many successes make people arrogant.
The more successful people are or they think they are, the more they intend to attribute the success to themselves and ignore the impacts of platform, macro trends and even luck.
This inevitably makes the vast majority of people arrogant. And they start to ignore and even look down upon the factors that made them successful in the first place: rules of how the world works, human nature, laws of physics and even common sense.
What follows is inevitable failures. And the more successful they are, the harder they fall and the harder it will be for them to get back up.
This is also sound logic. And I believe it is also well-known.
But “Knowing” is oceans apart from “Doing”. (This is another topic I will elaborate in future posts.)
People who can avoid this vicious cycle are so few that there may be only a handful of them across the entire 5000 years of Chinese history.
People who fell into this cycle are everywhere, ancient or modern.
Jack Ma is probably the latest example.
On Sept 10, 2019, the Teacher’s Day in China and 20th Anniversary of Alibaba, Jack Ma “retired”.
At that time, it was super well received.
More than a few opinion leaders in China expressed their praises: Jack Ma successfully retired as such a successful entrepreneur, which would take tremendous wisdom and discipline to accomplish. They envisioned “good ending” for him.
About one year later in 2020, Jack Ma gave a speech that was seen to be “out of place” and then Ant Group was cancelled from going public.
Rumors are that Jack Ma’s condition is tricky or even risky.
Most of us will succeed and fail more than once in our lives, no matter how small those successes or failures are.
This is just life.
To make the most out of our lives, I think two things are clear：
- The experiences of success are invaluable. It is better to set out to succeed and then fail than never trying, even if we end up in the same place.
- We just need to succeed one more time than failure. Even if we cannot, as long as we have tried our best, there should be no regret. Passing a certain point, successes or failures will carry less meaning than life itself.
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