We’ve been listening to James Clear’s book “Atomic Habits.” He reframes the idea of winning and success as surviving.
For as long as I can remember, I understood winning to be inextricably linked to achieving. If I simply did more or, better yet, did more better than anyone else, I could succeed and win.
The thing that has been becoming more and more clear is that, in fact, winning and success are simply the side effects of lasting through the war of attrition you may or may not know you’ve signed on for.
The more you try things and fail, or come up short in any other way, the more abundantly clear it is that the true victors are simply the ones who survived (the more optimistic of us might prefer to think of “overcoming”) their obstacles and hardships. Success lies not in the accomplishment, but instead, in the survivorship. It’s why we love to hear about the struggles of the rich and successful: It confirms what we have long suspected in our hearts, that success must be earned. It is never granted.
All successful people have earned their place through surviving. It gives us hope that we, too, might also find a way to survive into winning.