What scares you more: success or failure? You might say failure. Sure, it’s terrifying to disappoint yourself and others when you don’t meet your goals. But success scares me more.
With success comes expectations. Whether you were a tennis prodigy or high school valedictorian, these early successes can help affirm your identify and boost your confidence. You expect to do well again and when you do, you receive another affirmation to your strengths. As someone who was far from a child genius, I never had these expectations about myself. So when I got into UCLA, I genuinely thought they made a mistake in reviewing my application. I thought I was just “lucky.”
This is the toxic “I’m just lucky” mindset that I want to talk you out of today. When the default is failure, you assume something is wrong when you succeed. There has to be a mistake. But in reality, there are none. You deserve your accomplishments! You studied those long hours in the library for your midterm or ran extra miles on the weekends for your race. Those are all your efforts!
You need to keep in mind that people can change. People grow up. Even if you weren’t a child genius, you can work hard and successes in life. Ed Sheeran used to be bad at singing, and Michael Jordan didn’t even make it to his high school basketball team.
Your life isn’t a “success story” either. The same goes for Ed Sheeran’s life or Michael Jordan’s. We all experience failure at some point, and it’s up to your mindset to decide to move forward or get stuck there.
Success is sometimes uncomfortable. But you deserve your accomplishments. Luck is only part of the game! And when failure comes again, you know that you can move forward towards success again. That’s when you should actually feel lucky… because once you experience failure, you can only go up from there!