Don’t Read Success Stories, you will only get a message -Abdul Kalam

Don’t read success stories: This is one of my favourite quotes from Abdul Kalam. It talks about the value of these failure stories that gives us so much more than inspiration. This quote packs us with inspiration about the power of failures and why it is important to recognise, acknowledge and respect them. We make the mistake of hiding failures as something to be ashamed of. In this article, we talk about the power of failures, how to derive the value out of them for our life.

Don’t Read Success Stories Meaning

Most motivational quotes we read talk about perseverance, fighting hard and winning despite the odds. However, we miss out on the beauty of failures because a failure is treated as a villain in this case. If we pause for a minute and think – these failures give us lessons to learn and grow. Without these failures, we can’t succeed because none of us are perfect. We have to learn things and move forward to become better and worthy of success.

This is precisely where this quote, don’t read success stories shines. The success stories give us much-needed inspiration, but they stop after a while. The real lessons are in failures because they give us golden information about how to anticipate them or prepare for them. Failures tell us that life is not going to be perfect and we can prepare for this.

Don’t read success stories, you will only get a message. Read failure stories, you will get some ideas to get success

Source – Abdul Kalam Quotes

Success sometimes blinds us into thinking that things are easy. But nothing worthwhile ever is. For every success, there are numerous failure stories, each of these packed with lessons. We don’t have to make all the mistakes, but we can learn from others and give ourselves a better chance to succeed.

Inspiration: Don’t read success stories, you will only get a message, read failure stories, you will get some ideas to get success – Abdul Kalam Quotes

The success quotes and stories carry a lot of inspiration. This quote inspires us to look beyond successes and failures to the position of continuous growth and excellence. In our lives, we will face numerous successes and failures. Failures leave us with lessons to carry on and shape our lives for the better. In fact, this is what the failure stories tell us – to be aware of how things go wrong, what to do when it happens and how to live a life for sustained growth and betterment.

Don’t read success stories, you will only get a message. Read failure stories, you will get some ideas to get success

The success stories are powerful for their inspiration – making us dream and wonder. The failure stories might appear depressing at fist. But they give more value than just the message of failure. If we delve deep into these failure stories, they tell us how to change our approach. This way we don’t have to make all the mistakes in our journey.

We can learn from someone else’s mistake and yet continue in our journey of success. The inspiration in this quote is to look at success and failure with respect and recognise what message and lesson we can take from it.

Practical Steps: Don’t read success stories, you will only get a message; Read failure stories, you will get some ideas to get success

While reading this quote, it is important for us to try and understand the practical steps that we can take. As much as we know to respect failure, it is hard to deal with it and overcome it based on our demand. Our situations are alwyas more complex. But this quote leaves us with some inspiraiton and praoctical steps we can take to make the most of our successes and failures.

Look beyond the inspiration from the success stories

Success is very lucrative. But the problem with success is that it makes us think that we are invincible. I’m not saying that successful people are haughty or too proud. But we must understand that success alone doesn’t give us the full picture. We look at successful people and think that it would be amazing to have what they do. This is inspiring and fun as well.

However, it doesn’t give us the complete view of the reality. It only shows the end result that we aspire for. Hence, we get motivated and inspired to reach this success. And this is a fantastic starting point for us to start planning for this success.

With the help of this inspiration of success stories, we ought to look for the challenges people have faced. These challenges tell us what to expect in real life. Also be very careful when you read these success stories. People like to romanticise things – not for any devious reasons, but because we are naturally inclined to create narratives and skip the details. In fact most of these success stories miss these details because people don’t introspect a lot when they succeed. It’s only when we fail, that we pause to think deeper and make sense of things. Hence our failure stories can give us a lot more insight because we’ve spent time analysing them.

Respect failures, look for lessons in your and other failure stories

For every success story, there are numerous failure stories too. These have beautiful lessons for us to understand and what to avoid in order to become successful. As we become more aware, we can plan and create a strategy to accept these challenges and move forward. The stupid way tells us that we ignore all challenges because we are motivated. But the smart route tells us that we will be aware of these failure stories because they can tell us what can go wrong.

Once we know both sides of the coin, we can plan our journey, figure out what works for us and then plan around it. Our situation will be different from the success and failure stories. But Abdul Kalam makes a beautiful point in saying -that reading failure stories, tells us what to do, and how to keep our eyes open for challenges. And instead of just reading success stories, maybe we can create our own. Avoid the failure which can destroy you – the best way to do that is to de-risk yourself by becoming aware and prepared. This is what risk mitigation strategy is all about – make sure that nothing can destroy you completely.

Counterbalance success and failure as feedback points

Success and failure are our definitions. What happens is just an outcome. If we are able to treat this objectively, we can learn from both success and failure without being biased by them. If you are able to create this filter either while planning your journey or while assessing your progress, this message can help identify what you need to do next.

These failure stories give us the lessons to think about and wonder if we are still heading in the right direction. There’s always an opportunity to learn and we don’t have to make all the mistakes just to learn. We can do a better job at learning and at a significant lower cost from someone else’s mistakes in life. So, failures don’t always have to be primary. The nudge – don’t read success stories gives us a staunch warning to consider the failure stories and their impact.

None of us is invincible. We may face similar failures or unique ones depending on what life wants to throw at us. We can’t control these situations but can certainly learn from these stories of failure which have been a learning point for numerous other people.

Don’t read success stories, you will only get a message. Read failure stories, you will get some ideas to get success

References:

• https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/986042.A_P_J_Abdul_Kalam
• https://www.indiatoday.in/information/story/apj-abdul-kalam-birth-anniversary-10-quotes-from-the-missile-man-of-india-2617037-2024-10-15