“Successful success”: why I don’t believe in it

And you know what annoys me? This has been the unceasing fashion for the so-called “successful success" for almost thirty years now. “One hundred steps to success”, “How to become successful”, “Come on, you can do anything” and other, excuse the expression, the nonsense pouring into my ears and eyes from an early age already naturally causes nausea.

Yes, because there is no success. There is a favorable set of circumstances.

Let's take, for example, two men of the same age, equally poor, but willing, let's say, to please me. One has thick hair on his head, the other, ahem, has a bald head, three hairs and six rows. The first one, with the hair, does nothing with his hair, except that he washes it once a week with laundry soap and combs it with five fingers. The second one buys expensive shampoos for baldness, rubs a pepper solution into his bald head three times a day, eats some dietary supplements, and does massages to make his hair grow. In general, climbs out of the skin. But the maximum that he manages to do is, with grief, to hold in half those two hairs that he has left and not completely turn into a bald dandelion. Before the hair of the first to him – as to the moon. The first, we repeat, does nothing and does not take a steam bath.

Well, which of them has more chances of “success”? Answer: the first one.

Because the first one just won the genetic lottery. But the second was less fortunate. And, no matter how he grumbles, he still does not achieve a brilliant result. You can, of course, advise the poor fellow to take his feet in his hands, earn a lot of money and get himself a hair transplant. But, fir-trees, this is how much effort is needed! And besides, it's not a fact that this transplant will take root, that his hair will be as thick and shiny as the first one. You can't argue against nature, as they say.

I'm not saying that you should go with the flow and do nothing. Need to do. But it is necessary to soberly measure the goal and the means spent on it. And also take into account the surrounding circumstances.

For example, you are an avid mushroom picker, and you go to the forest. Your goal is to collect a full basket of selected aspen mushrooms, so that later they can be dried for the winter (and, possibly, sold).

Question: how many mushrooms will you be able to collect in the forest belt of the nearest suburbs?

Answer: unlikely. It will be sooo difficult, since there are fewer forests in the Moscow region than people. There will be at least ten contenders for each mushroom. And, in all likelihood, in search of each mushroom, you will have to wander through the forest for a very long time, from morning to evening. And, rowing out of the forest, tired, hungry and angry, with a half-empty basket, you will feel like a complete loser. So much effort for such a small output!

And now let's mentally transfer our unfortunate mushroom picker to the Murmansk region, a small town surrounded by forest. There, where literally two steps from the city, mushrooms can be mowed with a scythe. You don’t even need to go anywhere, you don’t need to look for anything – here they are, huge, clean mushrooms, rising from the moss on the lawn. Just tear it and put it in a basket.

All you need is to take a few steps across the clearing, make a few bows – and literally in half an hour your basket will be filled with selected handsome boletus (in the North they are called “red-headed”).

Success? What more. Yes, but with minimal effort. All you had to do was be in the right place at the right time.

Here is the whole secret of “successful success”.

And all sorts of “gurus” who claim that they have achieved success solely by their hard work and iron will are, to put it mildly, disingenuous. Yes, maybe they did not sit idly by. But the main thing that helped them was a lucky coincidence.

You can break into a cake, waste time and energy, but if circumstances are against you, you won’t be able to achieve much. In other words, without luck and a favorable environment, hard labor will remain hard labor.

So what to do if you want success (money, fame, love, achieving a goal – everyone has their own) – but it doesn’t exist?

• Stop breaking into a locked door and trying to break through the wall with your forehead. The wall is still stronger, only you will break your forehead. First off, take it easy. Take a break. Let it go.
• Try to consider other options. For example, come back another time. Look for keys. Call a locksmith. In the end, look for another door if there is no way to get into this one.
• Humble yourself and accept that not all doors are open to you. Yes, this is perhaps the most annoying. The parable of two frogs and butter does not always work, alas.
• If you really, really need to achieve your goal “right now”, with all the complexity of the task, you can take all your will into a fist and make a forced march. But we must understand that the first time to kick the door, most likely, will not work. That you have to make more than one colossal effort, and not two. Do you have enough resources to go all the way? And most importantly – are the resources spent worth the goal?

It's like a poker tournament. Each player hopes to reach the final and hit the jackpot. But out of a thousand, only one wins.

And how many of those obsessed to reach the top are lost in the dust? How many who have not reached this final lose even what they had, go into impotent rage, slide into depression? What is characteristic, the closer to the final you flew out of the game, the more offensive.

Every sane and adequate person will say that you should not play such games. And the race for the “dizzying success” that is promoted from every iron is not the same gambling?

You have to set tasks for yourself. But they must be strong. If your chance of winning is one in a hundred, you need to understand from the very beginning that most likely you will lose.

Trying to succeed in adverse circumstances is difficult, almost futile, and will only dry you to the core. It's as pointless as looking for cloudberries in Bitsevsky Park, and apples in Yagelny Bor.

Therefore, there are two options here – either accept the fact that cloudberries do not grow in Bitsevsky Park and stop looking for them there, content only with what this forest can offer – or go beyond the Arctic Circle to Yagelny Bor for cloudberries. But it will be so expensive that it is easier to buy this berry.

So let's leave all these "hard work on the way to success" to the storytellers.