Idea to Success

Last weekend we invited two near and dear friends over for dinner.  Over the course of our friendship, Alix and Troy have been fantastic to us and our family.  I have so much respect for both of them.  Alix is incredibly talented - check out her company Sutton Place Cookies.   Troy (Senior Vice President ofMarketing and Advertising for YapStone) has been a consistent source of wise, simple, yet mind bending advice.  I shared how starting a business is much more difficult in real life than on paper.  That unexpected obstacles come out of nowhere.  There are hurdles that you have to jump over to avoid getting tripped up.

Troy grabbed a piece of paper and made this diagram:

Troy said that most of society views Success as having a direct linear relationship to an Idea.  It makes sense from an outside perspective.  They see the Idea and they see the resulting Success.  Failure is not an option based on this diagram.

But what actually occurs is the following:

Here failure IS an option, even a requirement.  Failure is an opportunity to learn.  Every lesson learned from the previous failure brings you one step closer to Success.  Failure is not what we strive for and we work very hard to avoid it.  But the lessons learned are invaluable.  

The vast majority of Success occurs with failure as an option.  Those who learn from their past failures Succeed.