I don’t know a lot about what it takes to be successful. I once read this book called,“ 30 Things Every Woman Should Have and Should Know by the Time She’s 30.“ It was Glamour Magazine’s definition of success and womanhood. I failed miserably.

What I am learning lately, is that the road to success is paved with failure. They don’t usually write it in the biographies, or sometimes they do. But, here is what I know about about success:

To reach a certain level in life, any level that we can define as success, you have to try and fail at things. You have to have done things that didn’t work. You have to have apologized to people. You have to have those moments where you said, “In hindsight, I would have…”

Failure, a fortune cookie once told me, is the tuition you pay for success. I read that in the restaurant that day and nodded pensively in the way that you do when you read something deep but somehow can’t wrap your head around it. I saved it, and it haunted me for years.

I think about those things I would have done differently.  Maybe I should have done this, or that. But, really, would I have?

If I hadn’t had those failures, would I have been the same person? Would things have ultimately turned out the same? Was that detour, in fact, actually an integral part of the road?

I think success is not a golden pinnacle at the top of a mountain. It is a survivor’s triumph, received at the end of a messy graveyard of failure.