.

Q: You once said success is a lousy teacher. What did you mean by that?

A (Bill Gates): Anybody who’s super-successful has been misled a little bit. They don’t really know the actual magic factors of luck and skill that led them to this wonderful success. Hopefully they’re engaged in an effort where they have lots of failures, things that try and don’t work.

//We absolutely tend to spotlight successes. In business, on LinkedIn profiles, in portfolios, in the news, in 9-figure funding valuations, with self-congatulatory Medium posts camouflaged as case studies, in parenting, in pre/kinder/grade/mid/hi school… 

However, in coaching, or in the studio, we learn the value of iteration within a context of critical evaluation, of why improvement is needed, why an attempt failed, why success is elusively malleable and whose opinion of good you should sometimes/always/never-ish listen to. 

There is a priority awarded to the awareness of why you succeeded, or failed; in that action, in that moment, with that piece, with the gestalt of the effort. Because it’s that awareness, evaluation and iteration, that you take with you, outside the court, the pitch, the track, the field, the canvas, the monitor, the page, the studio, every single day.