The Only Path to Success--Your's

On more than one occasion each and every one of us has been presented with the very best well-worn out path but cut out our own path to success. But is it legitimately true that even listening perfectly to the very best advice would not be as successful as one’s own thinking and decision? Each and every one of us have been told and advised on what would be best for us allegedly by those who are “experienced”. By following it we never glean or learn any knowledge, the whole point and fundamental key to being successful.  This has been best put by the late G.K Chesterfield, a man famed greatly by his quote “I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.”

Theoretically, in no situation will doing what we think is best ever lead us away from learning. As humans it is our nature to learn best from trial and error. So we, humans who succeed in life from learning from our mistakes, must not ever blindly follow advice on a matter. If we do what we think is best, then we can learn from our failure or find that what we thought truly was the best. Conforming to advice will only lead us away from success because we will never learn anything.

Let’s say you are trying to do your homework, but one question just has you completely stumped entirely. Your friends, the great experts on everything who always know what to do, advise and tell you to just leave it blank because your teacher normally is relaxed with this stuff. But on a whim you decide not to take their advice but to just try out whatever comes to mind and show it to your teacher. Incredibly, not only is your teacher okay with it, but even gives you extra credit for trying such a difficult problem. Your own path of trial and error has just led you to find the very best success, understanding of how to deal with your teacher. You just learned and understood how best to deal with your teacher. A great lesson earned from nonconformity and individualism, true success has just come your way through your own path of trial and error and now you have reached true success.

Say you are walking into your first ever job interview. Those who always take the conformist approach and never try anything new, the “experts” have been advising you all week on how to dress and how to look professional, but you decided not to follow them.  You take your own approach and wear sweatpants and a sweatshirt to the interview because you think it will help you connect better with the interviewer. When you arrive you find yourself surrounded by professionally dressed people, so you lose all your confidence for the interview and don’t get the job. Are you still successful? Very much indeed because you still learn a very valuable lesson, that could never be learned for you by other people. You will now know that being dressed professionally works out better and just how valuable it is, a lesson those that simply won’t be received by following advice blindly to dress professionally. True success, knowledge gleaned and learned from humanely natural trial and error, cannot be achieved by listening to even the very best advice.