[MinnDarwin]

The question is:

Can you have success without failure? Or, another way to think of it: Can you be successful without failing?

Yes or no, but please explain your answer- it's going to a good cause (settling an argument between friends ).

[JoeDeveloper]

I don't see that one is dependent on the other. In general, one has more failures than successes, but that does not mean that a failure is required in order to obtain success. So, to answer your question, yes you can have success without having failure.

[Krimp]

All of my success has come after my failures. Success without failure is not satisfying.

[gregnnn]

Yes, you can have success without failure.

I've flown planes and never crashed them. I've sailed and paddled boats, and never sunk or drowned.

You have to risk failure to achieve success, and failure can be educational. But it's not a requirement.

[mystrymasters]

Yes I just voted for that poll successfully no failure to be found

[Shift Gorden]

I think generally no, you can't have success without failure. Whether the failure comes before or after the success, on some level things will get jacked up. People aren't perfect.

[Payload9]

You're asking two seperate questions. You can execute a plan without failure, but in order to attain the knowlege for such a plan, you must have people on your team that have failed and know what the pitfalls are. If you're the only one on the team, then you will have screwed up somewhere along the way, or learned from someone elses failures to achieve success.

Somewhere, someone has had to screw up. It's a part of experience. It's part of wisdom.

Everyone f*cks up. Everyone

[MinnDarwin]

Thanks for the great responses... keep them coming!!!

If nothing else, please vote!

[Kage]

You have to risk failure to obtain success or it wouldn't be 'success'. The greater the risk of failure the greater the feeling of success. It's not hard to pickup the morning paper - little risk and little success. Completing the Tour De France has a huge risk of failure, and a great feeling of success just to complete it or even better to win it.

You have to have the probability of failure to have the probability of success. You don't have to have failure present at the time of your accomplishment to have it be a success. But the ideas are not mutually exclusive as well. You could have both at the same time. Without failure there is no success. And conversely, there is no failure without success.

By the way, I like cheese.

[gorbachev]

The one thing I always get from watching profiles of successful people whether in entertainment or business is that before they hit it big, each and every one of them had been trying to become successful for a loooooong time.

They didn't necessarily have failures as such, but every single one had a lot of trying times before they got their big chance. I guess some might consider that failing. I don't know.

The only exception I can think of is probably the Facebook dude. It's his first product, it's been a phenomenal success pretty much from the get go.

Thinking about the question from another perspective. Everyone fails, all the time.

Let's say you're 30 starting a business. Aren't all your failures and mistakes from age 0 to 29 basically schooling you for running your business successfully? Obviously some people have had better "schooling" than others, but still, everyone learns from their mistakes, some more, some less.

And what is education really, but constant failing? I don't know about you, but I didn't get straight As at anything. I failed at every exam if you think about it that way.

Or what is socializing by your parents and people around you? Non-stop failing, and corrective action with the hope that you wouldn't do the same mistake again.

[Timtech]

I think it depends on what level of success you talking about. I dont think its possible to be successfull in everything you do all the time but overall I think you can have success without failure.

[I AM BIG DADDY]

Yes you can succeed without failing but it won't mean much. I took my .com salary and career success for granted 7 years ago... then I had 3 hard years of retooling, rebuilding and basically moderate degrees of failure as I fought back under pressure to keep my family from going bankrumpt. This year I came back with a HUGE success and even though I had been successful before, it meant allot more because I had something to compair it too.

[BlueFin175]

Sure you can have success without failure, but it's a relative comparison and depends entirely on the circumstances you considering. How you judge the level of success or indeed whether you have been successful is relative to a direct comparison of it's inverse. Some often judge success by the apparent lack of failure, others having recovered from actual failure itself. Some on the other hand would judge others success as perhaps a failure had it been themselves an v/v.

Personally, I myself prefer not to look at either specifically as it always seems to me to be bit of a vanity issue of some description. I have goals that I like to set and strive for, if actually achieved I always like to try and better those in the course of doing so, by definition thereby never actually succeeding or failing.

Additionally, I certainly would not like to make judgement of others success based on circumstances that I have no knowledge of.

[BanditoBorato]

Complicated question - IMO it depends on your definition of success.

For me, success is something beyond, something special. If you say someone is successful, you are normally describing an acheivement beyond what might be considered normal.

If that is the case, it is clear to me that achieving an unusual level of success in an endeavour requires that you take unusual risk and the likelihood of failure increases substantially. The failures encountered in a quest to achieve something special are important steps to creating the special accomplishment - there is value to the failure as it teaches you something about what you are trying to acheive.

If this is how you define success, I believe that failures need to be anticipated and expected. I would consider lack of failures as evidence that the acheivement was really nothing special... and probably shouldn't be considered something special.

[SG VENOM]

You personally can have success without failure BUT I think for EVERY success there is a failure that came before it. Let's take trying to sell a shirt as an example. You could make a shirt and have it instantly be a success but there were many failures before that (by other people) that would show what not to do when making a shirt.

I think it has to do a lot with what type of success you mean as well. Small success such driving your car without an accident can be obtained without failure but any other type of success IMO needs failure in order to learn.

[MinnDarwin]

Thanks again, everyone! Please keep the votes coming!

In case you're interested, I blogged about the evolution of the debate on my Fight Club blog. Please vote prior to reading this, though... I wouldn't want my opinion to sway yours. But I think you'll see why your votes matter...

This post has been edited by MinnDarwin: 11 September 2007 - 05:12 PM

[SG Sniper Shady]

This is an easy question. If the question is simply, "Can you succeed at something without failing?", then the answer is obviously 'yes'.

Example -

I want to lose 10lbs in a month. Over the course of the month I exercise, I lose the 10lbs. Therefore, I have met my goal. I have succeeded, and I have not failed.

If the question is more in-depth, such as, 'Can you be successful at something without failing?', then the answer is still, 'yes', though it is highly unlikely. It is nearly impossible to be successful at something without some degree of failure, but this is strictly dependent on what you are qualifying as failure.

For me personally, I could say, "I want to be successful at being a surgeon." Ok, well I have done what it takes to be a successful surgeon. Could you say I failed along the way? Sure. I haven't killed anyone, but I have been wrong before in decision making.

So, to sum it up, the blanket answer to your question would be 'yes', because anything is possible. The more intelligent answer to your question would strictly depend on what your definition of both 'Success' and 'Failure' is.

[gorbachev]

SG Sniper Shady, on Sep 11 2007, 01:24 PM, said:

I want to lose 10lbs in a month. Over the course of the month I exercise, I lose the 10lbs. Therefore, I have met my goal. I have succeeded, and I have not failed.

You could argue that you had already failed by gaining those extra 10lbs in the first place.

[BanditoBorato]

SG Sniper Shady, on Sep 11 2007, 12:24 PM, said:

For me personally, I could say, "I want to be successful at being a surgeon." Ok, well I have done what it takes to be a successful surgeon. Could you say I failed along the way? Sure. I haven't killed anyone, but I have been wrong before in decision making.

If you define success as a surgeon as "not killing anybody", this would be legit. But there are certainly degrees of success - given three surgeons, you should be able to identify one that is the most successful, looking at his wealth, contributions to the profession, specialized skill, etc. You might also identify one that is moderately successful but takes only moderately risky cases and "plays it safe". You might also be able to identify a surgeon in the group who successfully navigated his way through med school, finally made it out of residency, and holds down a position doing tonsilectomies.

All have "succeeded" in becoming surgeons. I would bet that each one experienced their share of failure along the way although it might not have resulted in a surgeons ultimate failure. But I would argue that the successful surgeon in the bunch is easily identifiable.

[SG Roshambo Ya]

I love this topic. I have very strong opinions about this topic, so thanks for posting.

I voted "no". If you are successful, without failing (at all) then you were more than likely guessing and got lucky instead of being successful. First, here are my favorite definitions of failure and success...

Quote

The condition or fact of not achieving the desired end or ends

Quote

The achievement of something desired, planned, or attempted

Now, here is what I meant in my opening statement, and why I voted "no"...

• If you make a decision, and you have experimented, and/or tested, then you probably have some negative results. Those negative results are failures. Albeit small failures, they are failures nonetheless.
  
• If in your lifetime, we all have experiences that guide our decisions. Those experiences are mostly made up of both good and bad experiences. The bad experiences are also failures. Certainly we make decisions to get the "desired end", or good experiences, not the bad ones. Regardless, we fail, and those bad experiences end up in our decision-making matrix for future consideration.
  
• Lastly, I don't equate guessing to success. I equate it to luck. There is nothing wrong with it, but you have achieved nothing but luck, and not success, IMHO. I know others will probably disagree, but I consider decision-making vs guessing (or being lucky) to be very different things.

I think success is achieved through experience, intelligence, timing, courage, and sometimes, luck. Often, luck is just a calculated risk masked as a guess, and in reality...we pulled upon past experience to decide if we will take a calculated risk. Our past experiences include successes and failure, to make that "guess" less about pure guessing and more about pulling upon experiences to push us to take a calculated risk. Therefore, failure, no matter how small, or in the distant past it might be, is part of the decision you are about to make, so you failed experiences are a part of your future successes as well as failures. Besides, the successes that come from taking a calculated risk are more about courage than luck in my experience. Not everyone is willing to take a calculated risk. Most people stay away from that type of accountability and not pull the trigger on a big decision. It often separates a leader from a follower...but that is another discussion .

One other thing to note...success and failure, when it comes to life, both carry extremely subjective definitions, and only the individual can set the criteria for which end has been achieved. Life is too many shades of gray for anyone one person, or even a group of people to decide a "success" or "failure" criteria for anyone but themself. That leaves everyone a lot of room to be the best they can be.

Obviously, these are all my opinions from my experiences of being on this planet for 40 years, so it only has value if you decide there is merit in what I have said. Regardless of other opinions, I am very strong in my opinions on this subject, but I am willing to discuss it with anyone.