The Right Kind of Success
Success, sometimes doesn’t exactly produce the results we intented. What I mean is, we might get the short-term results we hoped for, but it might not be the right thing for our long-term plan.
Here are a couple of examples to explain this better:
- In mid-1960’s, the Japanese resort town of Atami made great effort to build a high-speed train between Atami and Tokyo, which was three hours away at that time. After the railway was completed, tourism declined – in part because a lot of people wanted to take that drive to get away from the hustling world, which isn’t as charming if you can reach the place in fifty minutes.
- France’s mobilization efforts in the first weeks of WWII were so great that tens of thousands of war industry workers enlisted. As a result, these industries were practically brought to halt, thereby placing the country at even greater risk. Several months later, the new recruits were returned to their jobs.
What do I learn from these?
It’s vital to think your plan through. You have to take these ideas more or less as a chess game and see what would be your move, several rounds ahead. Also, we should take every failure as a lesson; its not a failure if you learn something out of it.
These examples have been borrowed from A Whack on the side of the head.