Success vs. Failure
How do you define success? Is it fame, money, followers, perfection?
How do you define failure? Is it not living up to your own or others’ standards, making mistakes?
Everyone has their own definitions of these concepts. My ideas may be different than yours. There is no right or wrong answer. Is there really a difference between the two? I would say no.
Success, to me, is simple. It is happiness, contentment, peace, acceptance. You don’t have to get a promotion to be successful. You don’t need to make a 6-figure salary. Your social media following doesn’t need to number in the thousands or hundreds of thousands to feel that you’ve made it. What is the dictionary definition of success? According to Roget’s Thesaurus, it is “The achievement of something desired, planned, or attempted.” Merriam-Webster states that to succeed is “To result favorably according to plans and desires.” But my favorite definition of success is this:
To turn out well.
When you look at it that way, success or failure is all in the mind. It is in your perception of the results of a thing.
If your results are not what you had wanted or expected, you might call the endeavor a failure. But what if you could find the goodness in those “bad” results? Wouldn’t that mean everything turned out well?
Let’s look at a couple examples.
Whenever I travel, I like to take a few self portraits in my hotel room at some point during my trip. Each room is different, and each set of photos works with what makes that room unique. I went to Block Island a few years ago and in my room was a mirror which faced some cool curtains. I woke up early each morning and I noticed that the golden light from the sunrise streamed in through the window and on to those cool curtains. I seized the opportunity. Setting my tripod up, I took a series of portraits looking through the mirror at myself. The first few photos I took were way off, I hadn’t positioned myself in the right place. I gradually fixed the positioning of each part of the scene, but still I wasn’t happy with the photos. It was early in the morning, I looked tired, and the light was changing fast. Figuring it was a lost cause, I packed up and headed for breakfast.
When I returned home, I looked at my photos from the trip and one of the self portraits caught my eye. It was one of my “failed” images, where I wasn’t quite in the frame. I knew there was something about it that made it evocative, thought-provoking, mysterious. It was truly a happy accident. I submitted that failed image to an exhibition, it was accepted, and it even sold. The owner now tells me she loves walking past it in her home each day. From what I thought was failure, came success.
"The Hint of a Spark," the photograph described above, which I initially thought of as a failure.
When I was first gifted the Holga camera that I now faithfully carry with me everywhere I go, I didn’t know much about it. The settings are quite simple: options for cloudy or sunny and a choice of 4 focal lengths are all the control you have over your photos (and that’s even debatable). The first roll of film I put through that camera I had high hopes for. It was mostly taken on a cloudy day, as I snapped away on the shutter, taking more photos than I normally do in my excitement about this new piece of equipment. I got the roll developed right away, and… only 1 single photo came out! What a failure, to lose almost an entire roll of film! The one photo that I got was from a sunny day, the Holga’s optimal weather conditions. But I learned from it. I figured out how to make my images come out during all kinds of conditions. I developed a style of taking multiple exposures of a single scene, which creates a look that I love. Had I not failed and learned from it, I wouldn’t be making the photos that I am now. Finding something that I truly love doing is success to me.
An example of a multiple exposure photograph taken on my Holga camera.
If you are genuine, if you learn from mistakes, if you free yourself to find joy in things, you will be successful. If you value your followers or want to earn income doing what you love, that will come in time. Sometimes the things that don’t happen the way we envision them are the things that define us and create the success we crave. I would say that we shouldn’t be so quick to label outcomes as failures before seeing what grows from them.
In the end, everyone has a different definition of success. It’s important for each of us to think about what that means for us. When you know what success looks like for you, it’s easier to work towards it.
