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Comment by cjcenizal | Hacker News Reader

Success can have a strange effect. It raises the bar for you. The merit of your accomplishments become relative to what you did yesterday. If you don't out-perform past results, you're failing. And if you're failing... then aren't you a failure?

I think we forget that failure is the default state. Which redefines success to be making any attempt at all. Like Edison said: "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

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From Andre 3000: "Baby boy you're only funky as your last cut, you focus on the past your ass'll be a has what"

From Jay-Z..."Treat my first like my last, and my last like my first"

The intro on that song is even better; it's a Biggie sample from an unpublished 1996 interview [some "like"s omitted]:

"Puff [Daddy] told me, the key to this joint, the key to staying on top of things, is treat everything like it's your first project, nomsayin'. Like it's your first day back when you was an intern. That's how you try to treat things, just stay hungry."

A person only fails when he/she stops trying.

I get what you mean, but I feel like sometimes it's important to just stop if you're repeatedly failing at something. I often find that taking a break (stopping trying for a bit) gives my subconscious time to breathe and figure out what my conscious brain couldn't.

Have you actually found that to be a useful thing to believe -- "I'm a success as long as I can get out of bed...?"

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