Partial success and the writer
Earlier this year, I wrote a pair of posts on giving up and embracing failure. For some, those are depressing topics. But they’re topics we all have to face at some time or another.
You’ll notice that I don’t write much about success. Mainly because success has become an all-or-nothing proposition. Sadly, we live in a world in which extremes are the norm. You either fail or you succeed. Far too many people discount the middle ground — a partial success is too-often deemed a failure. But it shouldn’t be.
While you’re not going to be successful with everything you try, you’ll probably have just as many (if not more) partial successes than you’ll have so-called successes. And definitely more of them than failures.
Defining partial success
That can be tricky. It will depend on what you hope to achieve, and what your tolerance for failure. For writers, here are a few examples of what I consider to be partial successes:
- Aiming to write a book within three month, but only completing half of it
- Setting a five-posts-a-week blogging schedule, but only being able to write two to three posts a week
- Trying to break into 10 new markets this year, but only cracking four or five
There are definitely more examples out there.
Learning from your partial successes
If we can learn from our failures and from our successes, why not from our partial successes too? There definitely is a lot to take away.
Like what? Perhaps you don’t have the time complete that big project, and need to tweak your time management system in order to get it done. That said, even if you don’t finish a book you probably have material for more than a couple of articles, blog posts, and the like.
You could learn about focusing your queries to specific markets, or that your writing isn’t suited for some of those markets. You could even be influenced to learn more about a niche and apply yourself to become competent writing for it.
You will, of course, need to look closely and clinically your partial successes. Don’t focus too heavily on what didn’t work. Analyze what did work. Think of ways to improve on the successes.
Have any partial success stories? If so, share them by leaving a comment.
Photo credit: csaba fikker from Photoxpress
Spot on. Failure is an essential ingredient to creativity. A few more perspectives on this notion.
@Bruce, thanks for the comment. Good points on failure there. BTW, I edited your comment to fix the URL to your post — the link was broken (not your fault; that happens a lot when copying and pasting long lines of text).