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Don’t read success stories: This is perhaps my favourite quote by Abdul Kalam that packs a sense of reality into the romantic world of success. 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. 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.

Don’t Read Success Stories Meaning

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.

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

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.

Read failure stories, You will get some ideas for success

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.