Parents, teachers, and self-claimed personality development gurus; you keep hearing success stories from them. Rags to riches, pauper to powerful, and similar taglines they use for the stories they profess.

But what is the other side of success nobody tells you and as a result of their brainwash, you never even get an idea to think over it. For achieving success, you will have to sacrifice innumerable pleasures in life and keep track of your goal. But what is the guarantee that your goal is correct for you and is not superficial? What if after you trying hard for several years you realized it as a waste of time and you could have enjoyed life so much had you taken your goal not so seriously?

There are many such questions that can be raised. Many people get those doubts while setting a goal, working towards it, or while facing the setbacks. But they won’t express them because they fear the judgement of people around them. They would be branded as complacent, incompetent, and lazy. So the blind emphasis on hard work, dedication, focus, patience, persistence, not giving up, perseverance all these words seem so fancy to hear that you stop questioning them or thinking in a different perspective.

What would your dedication give you if all your energy was spent on a wrong cause because of the blind dedication? What would your hard work pay you back if on your death bed your mind says “I worked so much, I should have sometimes relaxed and talked to my friends”? When you didn’t give up on a goal that killed 5 to 10 years of your valuable time in life, how would your future-self regret the fun you missed? Most importantly, what if after the perseverance, you reached your goal but lost all your energy in the process, so that you miss your original self and you couldn’t enjoy the moment because you lost your excitement in life?

Success sets expectations for you, be it from others or from your own mind. Success makes you take yourself seriously and you can’t accept your downfall in any manner. You get angry when you do a small mistake, you lecture people on how to be perfect, you preach about getting up the success ladder through excellence, you blabber about success stories and cliche quotations from popular philosophers. Failure sets you free, no one expects anything from you, your mind thanks you for your existence on the Earth. In one line, Success builds you stress and Failure sets you free.

If you want to be happy in life, never listen to the guilt-inducing success stories. Life actually lies in failure stories which are full of facts., reality, and basics. An average man can never connect to Mark Zuckerburg but many people will connect to people who even failed in supplementary exams of their graduation. Never compare yourself to successful people because there are many actual biggest failures among them. They have been busy all their lives chasing success that they could never compensate the enjoyment they missed.

Success gives you a stardom but failure gives you freedom. And remember, freedom is the biggest success in life than anything else.