Successful Frameworks

When it comes to Success, we are talking about building. Very few people jump into Success. Instead, it is built, and, I might add, if you want Success to endure, then you should build carefully. All solid and enduring structures have very good foundations.

The thing about humans is that we learn. I’m not saying that animals don’t learn because, obviously, they do. We all seem to learn by observation and experience. There is some kind of quote about learning from history, and I refer to the Age of the Sage website and a cartoon with the following quote:

“Those who don’t follow history are doomed to repeat it.
Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.”

— age of sage

There are people who learn from experience/history, and there are people who don’t. If you research people who suddenly have a large financial windfall, like winning the lottery, you will find a large majority of those people end up bankrupt within a relatively short period of time. This could be related to their lack of ability with finances; they haven’t had time to build a foundation of knowledge to adequately and wisely manage their money. We’ve probably all heard stories of children who inherit wealth, property, or a business from their parents and end up mismanaging it.

When it comes to Success, we want to build our Success on a firm foundation by learning from the past and applying it to the future. This takes effort, and many people will stop right there after reading the word “Effort.” You may have heard that if there is something worth doing, it’s worth doing well. The same applies to Your Success. I always remember a funny scene from one of the Marx Brothers’ movies.

One of the Marx brothers is meeting with a gangster who wants to hire him for protection. The gangster asks him, “How tough are you?” Chico responds, “Well, you pay a little bit, then we’re a little bit tough. If you pay very much, then we are very much tough. You pay a too much, we’re a too much a tough…“

That’s kind of the way I think about life and Success. You put a little into it, and you get a little success. You put a lot into it, and you get a lot of Success. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work like that. You can put a lot of effort into something and get very little return or maybe even find yourself with nothing or going backward. But that is where learning comes in. If you learn something from your experience, you may not have won, but you haven’t lost. You simply use what you have learned and take the next step.

As you may have noticed, I’m challenging the normal thought pattern of the definition of Success. So, let’s discuss the definition of Success in our blog, Success Definition.