Recipes for Success

I have a friend who likes to believe he will be a success in business. I believe in him. I trust he will succeed. But I do caution him to use a recipe that will help him achieve his goals. The recipe is something like this: 1 tbsp Inspiration 1 tbsp Optimism 5 cups Perspiration 2 tbsp Failure 1 cup Persistence 1 cup Reality Sprinkle with Purpose and bake for as long as you need to succeed. I am my own worst critic. I have a bunch of shortcomings. I m not as organized as I should be. I am not as focused as needed. I like shiny stuff. All combined it makes success difficult, but it also makes it even more rewarding. Despite my obstacles internally, I still find a way to make successes out of my work even when failures appear as well. I believe, and some weird study out of a university says, that success is made up of learning lessons from continually failing. Reality hurts, but it trains us to either evolve or become extinct. In some cases, extinction is good. Look at DDT. At the time, it was the wonder powder that would save farming. Shortly (some 80 years later) there after, it was vilified and was banned for health concerns. Paul Hermann Müller developed this product and won a Nobel Prize for it. Fast forward a few years later, and he's a villain, or at least his product was... The point is that trial and error, even if over long periods of time, pushes us further to continually develop and redevelop our initiatives for the better. While at some point Mr. Müller was a genius, and rightfully so, but his work did not end there. It spawns hundreds of other young scientists to push through his work and carry on with their own. They apply the recipe and hammer out their products so we, as a community, can further challenge ourselves and our ideas as to their merit. As my friend likes to tell me, he "will be" a success. And I agree, as long as he accepts defeat during the process as a drive to further development.