“Success is a tyrant that will enslave you just as quickly as failure.”

A thought by Erwin Raphael McManus from his book, The Last Arrow: Save Nothing for the Next Life (p. 43). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. (Click on the title to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.)

I have been sitting here reading and having a problem finding a thought to write on today.  You see I have had a good week of the number of people who have read this blog and that success has made it more difficult in finding a thought to write about today.  So, I got up and walked around the block and sat down in a different place and started looking back on thoughts that I have passed up and this one jumped out at me.  So here it goes.

Earlier Erwin said, “There is a subtle difference between your identity being rooted in your essence and your identity being rooted in your success. What you do comes out of who you are, but who you are must exist apart from what you do. If your identity is rooted in your success, then you will lose who you are when failure comes your way.

“Recently, after speaking at a conference, I was invited to participate in a live interview. I was asked how I have dealt with success now that I’d been invited to speak at this conference. (It’s funny how, even when we say we believe in character above talent and in faithfulness over the spectacular, there is still a not-very-subtle belief that it was speaking to thousands that validated my life and not the choices I made that remain unseen by most.) I told the interviewer that I thought I was successful when I was completely unknown and working with only a handful of people and that I never saw the measure of my success as speaking in large venues or conferences.

Erwin then says, “Success is a tyrant that will enslave you just as quickly as failure.  If you let success own you, you will find yourself trapped by your success and terrified by the possibility of failure. Success will lie to you and tell you that your future is just an extension of your past, when at its best, success is simply preparation for new challenges. Every day you will have to choose between living in the past, staying in the present, or creating a future. The great danger lies in that the easy path is to hold on to what you know, cling to what you have, and make the future an extension of the past. Though there is no way to stop time, you have to choose the future. Although you are grounded in the past, you must not be grounded by the past. And while tomorrow is coming regardless of what you do, the future comes because of what you do.”

So, will you learn from your success/failure and move forward?