Failure is definitely the best teacher we can learn from. No doubt about it. It is kind of ironic that success doesn't teach you much while failure has unlimited lessons to teach you. I guess, that is why the path to success is riddled with failures.

To be able to meaningfully succeed in life, we need to be capable of handling that success and that is what failure does. It builds us into the person we need to become to be able to handle success once we finally achieve it.

This is what most people don't realise. Everyone wants millions of dollars, houses, cars or whatever else they may consider as success, but no one thinks about whether or not they are actually capable of keeping all of it.

Getting somewhere is half the battle, even though we consider it as a finish line. In reality, staying there is what comes next and is the second half of the battle. How many times have we heard of people succeeding in something only to later return to where they were before? Too many times.

Building The Self

It seems like we humans are quite bad at handling extreme situations, whatever they may be. The reason is that we let our emotions take over and let them form the basis of our decisions instead of using our minds. Sure, there's intuition, but that's a different thing altogether.

That is why when we fail, our reactions are usually extreme as well. We lose all hope, we fall into despair and lose all clarity. Also, when we succeed, our reactions are again extreme and we go into a euphoric mode and become unwise in our decisions. We feel like nothing can beat us.

This is what needs to change if one has to become capable of remaining successful. We need to keep our emotions in check, and make decisions with our heads as they become even more important after reaching the peak. Therfore, building character becomes really important.

One of the best advice I have read which can help in this regards is to keep acting and thinking like you are just beginning your journey. Even though you are highly successful, just act and make decisions as if you were just starting out. This will keep you hungry, this will keep you from being over-confident and will ultimately go a long way to ensure that you remain successful.