Success vs. Achievement
Did you know the difference between Success and Achievement?
Did anyone even tell you how these are two completely different things, even when sometimes they might be taken as one?
In the book Start with Why, the author Simon Sinek describes it in a really simple and easy-to-understand way. In fact, it’s so finely explained that you would be wondering by the time you’ve read it how you could not have noticed it before.
Success and achievement are not the same things.
Achievement can more or less be called a part of success, but it can never ever be equivalent to it. There’s just no competition between the two.
It’s the same thing as winning the war, not every battle.
Achievements are like little battles that come in the way, and you try to conquer as many of them as possible, but success is the real war. The real game-changer. In the end who doesn’t matter is the achiever, like the overachiever. Who matters is the one being successful.
The comparison:
Achievement is a one-time thing. It happens, and ends. Like the battle. People compete, someone accepts defeat, and one wins.
You had a goal in mind, you achieved it. Well done.
But what now?
Are you going to spend your whole life basking in the glow of these achievements or are you going to do anything else?
Like, are you forever going to feel good about that one achievement and forget about the rest or are you going to achieve more and more and more, continuously?
The thing is, there’s something that prevents you from doing this. Without you even noticing.
After having that accomplishment under your name, you seem lost, you find no other purpose for yourself because you technically had one, but you completed it. You checked it off your to-do list—and guess what, it was the last thing in there.
What do you do now?
Where do you go now?
Find some other purpose when you always seemed to have just one, and now nothing else interested you anymore?
This is the problem. You are not.
Success eliminates this feeling.
Success in itself is a feeling too—the feeling of having a purpose being fulfilled, again and again, the feeling of living your dream, finding your ikigai, the feeling of accomplishing what you had set out to do.
The only difference between success and achievement is that success is a feeling, while achievement is solid. Achievement is something you can measure, while success is that indefinite feeling of happiness, self-satisfaction, contentment with oneself.
You feel successful. You are successful, and to remain successful all your life, you need to stay consistent. You don’t need to stop after one achievement, you need to achieve more and more constantly until it becomes a habit of yours.
Achievement means winning once. Success is being a winner, again and again, until winning becomes your routine. That’s success.
Some people achieve things and others call it luck.
Some people become successful and others shut their mouths.
This is the primary difference between success and achievement.
When the Roles are Reversed:
One more thing that you shouldn’t forget is that achievement is permanent. It’s really permanent.
Suppose you got a college degree, from a really reputed institution. That doesn’t necessarily bring you success unless you work for it, but it does resemble a really great achievement of yours. The college degree is going to be framed and it’s always going to hang it on the wall.
It’s permanent. Nothing you do or wish is going to reverse it, or erase it. That’s an achievement of yours. Well done.
But I’m sure getting a college degree wasn’t really the purpose of your life, was it?
I mean, that surely wasn’t the only thing you had wanted.
It was a battle. The war was still left.
That war is known as success. Getting successful. That’s the real challenge.
And the really unfortunate thing is—success, no matter how big and grand it may be, is temporary.
Success can be temporary.
It seems revolting how that staircase to fame and reputation, all that grandeur and liveliness could come to an end really easily, all within a matter of just a few bad decisions, a few mindless actions.
That’s how fragile success is.
Not fragile like a flower.
Not fragile like a grenade either.
Fragile like a pile of dominoes. One witless push, and it would all come tumbling down.
You can take years to rise to fame, and you can fail in one night.
It can take you a decade to get a brand name, and the company can fall within a matter of days.
If you don’t keep the systems up, if you don’t keep the routines and methods going, I bet one day or the other, your hard work is going to pay off. And then so will your excuses.
If you rank the top in whatever field you are, work to keep that ranking up. It’s the only way to stay where you are, to not fall down.
Like I said, one achievement is one battle. Each one can either make you eat dirt, or it can strengthen your mind and body. But everything is always preparing you for the war.
The bigger picture.
It’s simple, really.
Look for success, achievements are like opportunities that keep coming up in the way.
And it’s okay if in the end you win the war, but not every battle.
