Success has ruined many a man Benjamin Franklin True success is the only thing that you cannot have unless and until .youhave offered it to others
Sri Chinmoy Tom Peters, the corporate guru of the millennium, 'delights to shock you. So when he says "success begets failure", you try hard not to look shocked. In fact, you try hard not to look confused as well, because his statement is self-contradictory, or so it seems. But there is more to it than meets the yet First of all, what is success? According to Webster's dictionary, success is the gaining of something desired, planned or attempted, particularly the gaining of fame or prosperity. Well, there could be a thousand different shades of meaning to this word, but by and large, we can take it to mean getting what we want.

Success vs happiness
Success is generally equated with happiness. Failure surely makes us sad, so if we succeed in getting what we want, we should become happy, right? Well, not always, you say. You and I know of umpteen instances wlien 'we wished we had not "succeeded", simply because the aftermath of that success brought in, so many complications that we could hardly anticipate earlier when we were busy trying to succeed.
There are fall-outs of success that can create stress in our mind set. Some are positive while others are negative. We have for instance the sense of responsibility that success places. On us, which can be viewed as a positive development. But this responsibility element could turn into a clumsy burden if we are caught unprepared.
The immediate reaction to any success is of course jumping for joy, but sooner or later, we get into the pensive mood of how to carry forward the success label. Take a simple example of getting a gold medal in an exam. After the celebrations die down, the medal demands the tough task of living up to it. That means not merely getting another gold medal in the next exam next year but also behaving like a true gold medallist - whatever that means - from the very next moment onwards. That is more than you bargained for. You are now expected to know a lot of things that you might not have otherwise cared to know, or stay at least one step ahead of the guy next door, all simply because of that gold medal that has been pushed into your hands.
I can hear you already protesting. Come on, you say, the way you are painting success as a: calamity and a burden is simply crazy! Who would want not to succeed simply because of the burden? 'Etc etc. Very well, you are absolutely right. Success is indeed a very good
. thing to happen to all of us, provided we watch out. And watch out like a hawk.
            New ball game

Today's laurels are tomorrow's compost, said Tom Peters. In other words, success means not plucking laurels once, but plucking them everyday, for the rest of your lives. Worse still, laurels alone won't do, you must learn to pluck lotuses and lilies as well. To
. day's life is like that. More than holding on to what's in hand, there is this compulsion to keep learning new tricks as we move along, if we want to keep our success label alive and kicking.
Most often, the factors that made you successful become inoperative the moment you have achieved success. Take for instance, an office promotion from an executive to a manager. You were no doubt very good as an executive. You. worked very hard And you burnt the midnight oil to produce results, not just once but you did it month in and month out, year in and year out, that's why the management promoted you as a manager. Fine.
But now that you are a manager, you are at a different plane. You now have to start a whole new ball game as you realise that hard work alone won't be enough any more. In fact, simply working hard as you did in your earlier days might even be counterproductive to your success in the new paradigm. Your job content now calls for getting work done by managing people and situations with better understanding and empathy, rather than just slogging away yourself. This could well be that crucial moment when your own success could beget your failure. Unless you pick up and develop totally new traits at this new level of life.
Such examples can be multiplied at all levels in all walks of life. Take courtship and marriage for instance. Your courtship was successful, that's why you entered into marriage. But many of your courtship traits will have to be given up after marriage, which calls for a different set of interpersonal skills to acquire and nourish. That is how you graduate from a lover to a loving husband. Onto a loving father, loving father-in-law, loving grand fatherIt is an unending process.
Relative failure

While success brings with it the fear of impending failure, the actual failure itself may be absolute or relative. A friend of mine became a manager at the age of thirty-one which was unheard of in the company he was working. That too after putting in just two years of service in the previous cadre. That was success with a capital S for sure. But quite apart from others' expectations, my friend's own mindset got attuned to expecting the next promotion within two years which was not to be. There was simply no scope or room for such a promotion in that company. Instead of understanding the ground realities, my friend became impatient and his frustration started showin2: on his performance and personality.
Now, not getting the next promotion within two years was only a relative failure, if at all. But my friend perceived it as a catastrophe, so he became a real failure. Lots of things go by perception in life. When we are sitting in an accelerating train or airplane, we initially feel the momentum gathering, but once a steady speed is reached, everything looks still and unmoving. In real life too, when things are steady and cruising comfortably, a lack of perceptible change often makes people feel restless and frustrated. This could manifest as the so-called middle-life crisis in which individuals who are otherwise effective and rational start feeling insecure and perceive themselves irrationally as failures.
Most of the times, the underlying cause of this syndrome is simple. But it is ironically invisible and unknown to the person concerned. A common folly committed by many of us is to extrapolate our early-life success graph for the rest of our life, hoping to end up as an Amitabh Bacchan at 55 or so. But this simply does not happen, and hence the frustration of relative failure.
Relative failure is a very dangerous entity in its own way. It can drive people to do totally crazy and even disastrous things to them
selves and their families, unless there are counterchecks built into their lives. Those who are used to power, fame and adulation early in life, get addicted to them and crave for them when they start declining as part of natural law. Acts of bravado like bigamy, alcoholism, overindulgence and other attention-seeking behaviour at this juncture can cause untold misery to the loving family members of the victim.
Jealousy
This is a major negative fall-out of success with tremendous destructive power. Jealousy comes in many sizes and shapes. The commonest form is say, when you succeed, your neighbor becomes jealous of you. He suddenly turns nasty and you don't know how to deal with the change in his behavior. Conversely, when you succeed in two things in life while another neighbor of yours succeeds in twenty things, it is your turn to become jealous despite your success.
Jealousy knows no boundaries. It can hide itself for any length of time and then strike any one at any time, including close family members without their knowledge - husband and wife, father and son, brother and sister, the list can be endless. Hidden jealousy can be even more destructive than an open one, because it is so much more difficult to identify and eradicate. Ever tried getting any husband or wife to acknowledge that he/she is jealous of his/her spouse?
Jealousy is often projected as the problem only of the person who feels jealous, and not of the person who s the object of jealousy. How often do we read of celebrities nonchalantly brushing aside a rival's jealous viewpoint as something can be legitimately done to reduce the level of jealousy, so much the better for the person harbouring it as well as the object of jealousy.
That is where empathic communication comes in. Many successful persons forget - often unintentionally as they bask in their glory but at times deliberately if their value systems
are tilted - that their less successful colleagues
also have emotions of their own. If only they learn to take that little bit of extra care not to offend the sentiments of others. to the extent possible, life will become a lot easier for everyone.
All in all, for reasons right or wrong, success does end up as a crown of thorns on many a head that does not know how to stay cool and composed. If only the head is made to sit tight on the shoulders and also look down every now and then to ensure that the feet are placed firmly on the ground, then there should be no problem living with succes, however big it might be.