“Time hi kharab chal raha hai”

“Musibatein kabhi akele nahi aati”

“Misfortunes never come singly”

We’ve all heard these quotes several times and have seen innumerable examples of these play out. But the question to ask ourselves is why is this true? Why do good things or bad things happen many at a time. Is it simply because the stars are aligned against you and nothing you do in that period will yield to anything? Or is it because of some mental construct that plays out in our head. I do not intend to negate the effects of luck in our lives but I intend to question whether a continuous series of bad events is necessarily luck or a state of our mind. While this essay reads with a very strong bias towards our state of mind, I do thoroughly believe in the concept of luck. I am trying to dissect the role of our emotions in the whole cycle and for the sake of simplicity am not dealing with the nuances that luck brings into the picture.

What is success?

Before we discuss why success follows success, it is essential to define what success is. Is success a million dollar net-worth or is it a happy family life? Is it creating a small business that you love or is it getting the fanciest job in the world? It is impossible to define success in objective terms and it is even more difficult to differentiate between a successful and an unsuccessful person just by looking at them.

In my conception, success is defined as a state of mind where you as an individual have achieved what you desire in the short term or the long term. This goal could be something as simple as achieving a bare minimum level of fitness through going to the gym regularly to something as intense as building a business that lasts a lifetime. In this definition, success is the state of mind you get into when you achieve any goal you have set for yourself.

When talking about goals, we must also clarify what is a goal versus a dream. I am choosing to define a goal as anything that an individual is working towards. An individual's goal can be to get a 50 LPA package and for someone else the goal may be to just be rich. Even though one is very well quantified and the other is as vague as it gets, both of these are valid goals. The bias towards action is what separates a goal from a dream. I dream of living in a bungalow with a swimming pool and a garden. No steps I take in life are with the intention of realising this dream. The steps I take are to achieve my goals and in the process if I am able to live out my dream that’s a cherry on top.

With an understanding of what success means in this context, we understand that just because someone is earning 1+ Crore in a year doesn’t mean that the individual is successful. Their goal in life might be to start-up or to run an organic farm or to be a political consultant. Success for an individual is defined by how they visualise their lives and what their goals/checkpoints for the same are.

Failure Breeds Failures

This is where the beauty and nuance of emotions come in. We know of McKinsey consultants or IIM grads committing suicide because they were unhappy with their lives. They were traditionally successful but weren’t successful in their eyes.

This dissatisfaction with self creates a negative cycle of failure that accentuates all of your weaknesses and subdues all of your strengths. Along the same lines is the positive cycle of success that accentuates every positive attribute in an individual and subdues all negatives. Every individual is in simple terms a personality that has a unique blend of strengths and weaknesses. An individual’s strength can be their weakness on the bad days and vice versa. A communicative person might communicate the wrong things when in a negative frame of mind and might communicate brilliantly in a positive mental setting.

The difference between the cycles of success and failure is the extent of success or failure you must achieve to break out of the cycle. It varies tremendously from individual to individual. For one individual, smaller wins such as going to the gym regularly and bulking up can help break you out of a cycle of failure, while only larger failures such as not getting their dream job for a year can break them out of their cycle of success. For others, larger wins such as getting funded by a global VC is necessary to get them out of their cycle of failure while only a small failure such as losing a client’s deal is enough to get them out of their cycle of success.

Just as a success mindset positions you perfectly to make use of every possible opportunity in the world, a failure mindset brings you down to a point where opportunities start feeling like burdens. In a mirror image to the success state of mind, in the failure mindset you reach a state of mind where all your negative attributes are accentuated beyond reason. Every quirk becomes a flaw and every positive attribute is subdued by your intense state of mind. This forms the basis of a self-feeding cycle which is very difficult to break out of.

It is very easy to figure out if you are in a cycle of success or failure. If every small goal you try your hand at starts converting, you are in a cycle of success. Similarly, if anything you do ends up not working in the way you thought it would points to a cycle of failure.

How do you deal with this?

We’d assume that being in a cycle of success is the best state to be in and we should strive to reach there. But, as things go in life, every extreme has its share of problems. A prolonged cycle of success leads to overconfidence. This overconfidence finds its way of manifesting and shattering the beautiful cycle you were rolling on.

Unfortunately, unlike the positive cycle, there is no natural way out of the negative cycle. The negative cycle is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You find your way deeper and deeper into the cycle of failure unless you find a way to pull yourself out. It is easier said than done though.

The beauty with the failure state of mind is that after a point, you start losing the support system that made you successful. That may be your emotional resilience or your friends and family. The only way out of a negative cycle is through an ability to accept your state of being. Life often demands a “restart”. You must accept your state of being today as the starting point and re-evaluate your goals from there. This gets more difficult as you keep going into the depths of despair and it’s essential to find your way out as soon as possible. To be able to restart your journey towards your goal you need to not be miles away from it. Thus, being cognizant of the fact that you are in a cycle of negativity and that you need to break out is essentially the most important step towards moving into a cycle of success.

I understand how I used the words success/ positivity and failure/ negativity interchangeably but that is the point I am trying to drive home. It is our mindset that often sets us up for success or failure, and a crystal clear understanding of what our goal is and where we are with respect to our goals is essential to break out of the cycles of negativity and be grounded in our cycles of success.