Hidden Meaning of Famous Success Quote Reveals True Path to Confidence
I love success quotes. Today I came across one that ties in nicely with the article I wrote a few days ago about confidence. In that article, I made the argument that the main source of confidence is preparation.
However, after reading author Susan A. Jackson’s interpretation of the famous quote below, I feel the need to clarify.
“Nothing Breeds Success Like Success”
To that end, my clarification of preparation leading to confidence is simple. Not all preparation leads to confidence, only preparation that leads to success leads to confidence.
In addition, in Jackson’s seminal book Flow in Sports which she co-authored with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, she takes this even further by redefining success as commonly interpreted.
She states:
Success may mean the final outcome of an event, but just as likely it can also include your demonstrating a particular new skill or consistency in performance. The number of ways in which sport success can be defined is only limited by how many goals can be set in a particular situation. Each goal provides a yardstick for measuring subsequent success.
Attention to goals thus provides one way of optimizing success experiences. Setting multiple task goals gives a coach and athlete many opportunities to succeed…
With this in mind, the quote “success breeds success” creates a whole new philosophy for breeding confidence. In essence, confidence comes from properly executing 4 steps:
- Defining the right goals
- Planning the proper goal progression
- Investing the time to prepare to reach your goals
- Celebrating the wins and learning from the failures on the path to achieve each goal on the journey to long term success.