Success

Barb shares a lot of surfing videos.  We watched one that featured some of the world’s best surfers, surfing an awesome wave.  Some of them surfed it unsuccessfully.  They came a cropper big time.  It made us wonder on the outcome for them.  We guess they lived to tell the story. 
That prompted Merril to say that perhaps one success after many failures, would be a good thing to write about.  She probably meant, it would be good for me to write about it, but here I am (me here is Merril, and not me Peter.  Normally me, when I am writing, refers to me Peter.  But in this case, me refers to Merril and I refers to Peter.  If things were different the I would be Merril and the me, me, but they are not…different.)  If Merril does write about it, I look forward to it, as it is sure to be good.
Her saying what she did, instantly reminded me of what we hear about Edison.  How he tried hundreds of times, to perfect the lightbulb.  He failed multiple times.  It was his success that made him famous. It is not the hundreds of failures we investigate and study.  It is the success.  It changed the world.  Actually a person only needs to look at a night time picture to see how much light there is now.  For Astronomy, a person needs to go bush to find dark.
Ok, my successes won’t make me famous.  Kids don’t study Peter Kuskie at school.  At least I don’t think they do.  I have never heard of a teacher saying, “turn to page 222.  In the next 40 minutes we are going to study the influence Peter Kuskie had.”  It is what they are going to do with 39 minutes and 59 seconds of that time I wonder about.
Still, I have known success and it felt good.  What I really like is that failing 10, 578 times is not the important thing.  It is succeeding once that changes things.  Thankfully I do not think it is said of me, “today, I was going to study the failures of Peter Kuskie, but I really did not know where to begin.”  It is the success that is more likely to be studied.  Certainly failures can be valuable to teach me what not to do, but it is the success’s that teach me what I should do.
It is probably why one of the sayings I like is “don’t reinvent the wheel.”  Personally I will not do heaps again, when I have access to something done right.  It is what is done right I will prove for myself and then move on, and perhaps invent world peace or alleviate poverty for all.   Who knows.
The important thing for me is success.  I hate failing, but there are always lessons to be learnt if I will learn.  Sure, they may be important, but I like success better.  Probably because it is rarer.  Maybe if success was the default outcome of everything, I would not appreciate it so much.
Few things match, proving for myself something is right and moving on.  For me, it is like a building block in the never ending education that is life (wow, maybe I should be looking heroic right now, as that sounds really awesome to me). 
Still, I do not have time for that, as there is so much to learn and so little time.