The Ugly Truth About Success and Failure

I failed and succeeded multiple times in my life but never experienced such an intense response. I realized that success and failures brings out the ugly truth; the difference between real friends and just friends (acquaintances) from the set of people I call friends.

The events in the last week or so have turned my life around. From being hopeless about the future to suddenly planning a brighter one, everything changed in 5 days. Never ever in my dreams I had ever thought this would happen so fast, but I think the negation of Murphy's law (If anything can go wrong, it will) got better of me.

Since then I have been observing an interesting change in behavior of the people around me. I am most of the times oblivious to the reaction of the people around me. I have been through multiple events where some people around me described me as socially inept or a misanthrope. This time I have been forced to change the approach and observe closely the people around me due to some of the responses. Human beings are either social or antisocial animals and without a choice I have to be in one of those categories (I fall in later most of the times, :P).

I had calls from people I hardly ever expected. Completely bummed I had to retrospect and recalculate the imbalanced equations I had in my mind. I suddenly realized the people I hardly spoke to and never ever bothered about, were genuinely happy for me. I had a feeling that some out of those had a strong dislike for me, I was wrong and I was happy for a change I was wrong. Some of the words just changed my opinions about the people, I could feel the genuineness in the words and I was stunned for the first time in several years. The good old friends didn't disappointed me either. They were there in the rough time and it was good to know they were still around when the time has improved.

Also it was good fun to watch people who once wrote me off as a loser coming to congratulate. It is amazing how such people change their opinions about a person based on their success and failure w.r.t time. Their opinions are like a sine wave and such people are the most dangerous to have around. They judge the person by his social status more than his character and are highly untrustworthy. I would prefer to be at the top of the hate list of such people (I guess am very successful in this). I call such people the sine wave people.

I accidentally discovered another set of people who say, nice things on face and will slander in absence. In general their opinion about successful people is that they succeeded because they got lucky (with very few or no exceptions to this rule according to them). I still fail to understand if it is their jealousy or prejudiced opinion about that person that makes them sulk. More than a category this is a tendency and I call Sullander (Sulk+Slander). I would be lying if I say I never had this tendency, but I am happy I have banished this long back. I think every one of us at some point of time in life has this tendency and I don't think there is an exception to this statement.

Over the years I have met many people who were suppose to be my friends and only a few have lasted. I think it is the mutual respect and value for character that keeps me and them together. Instead of judging each other on success and failures we have judged each other by the character.

It is the people who criticize when you are wrong but never write you off, praise when you succeeded but make sure you keep your feet firmly on the ground are the people I call real friends. The act like a feedback loop that helps you achieve the set point and stops you from loosing stability. They are far and few and they get filtered with success and failures in life.

Over the years based on the ugly truth concept I have realized that real friends are not always the ones I hang out with or share most of my time with, real friends are those with whom I share my success and failures alike. They might be the ones I speak once a month or once a year or some whom I meet every day, its not a quantitative but a qualitative measure.

I have coined a saying for the ugly truth,

There is a set of friends who want to participate and share your joy, and there is a set who will share your sorrow, the intersection of the two sets gives you the set of friends that you want to share your success and failure with !