Success, before it was applause, meant what comes after.
Not the summit. Not the medal.
Just the simple fact that something follows something else.
“Success” comes from Latin, and its roots are more surprising than the modern meaning suggests. It literally means “to come after,” “to follow,” or “to come up from below.”
Success did not mean achievement, winning, or triumph.
At its root, success is not about conquering or striving upward.
It’s about what emerges after movement.
Not: “I forced my way to the top.” But: “Something followed from what preceded.” Less heroic climax, more continuation.
Imagine a year in which everything is stripped away. Work, money, place, certainty, language, future. A year that does not “build” but erodes. A year that teaches you subtraction until there is nothing left to subtract.
By the last day of that year, the modern word success feels obscene.
There is nothing to claim.
Nothing to showcase.
Nothing that could be turned into a lesson without lying.
And yet, succedere is still happening.
The year did not stop because it was cruel.
It kept going.
Days followed days. Breath followed breath.
Grief followed shock. Fatigue followed grief.
You followed yourself through terrain you never agreed to enter.
This is the older meaning at work: success as succession.
Not improvement but, continuation.
What “succeeded” this year was not a victory.
It was you, still here, stepping forward from under the wreckage.
Not rising above it.
Coming after it.
So when the new year arrives, you do not need hope.
Hope is loud and makes promises it cannot keep.
You only need to notice that the next day exists.
The new year does not ask you to be better.
It asks you to follow, to let one moment come after another, to allow life to advance the way it always has: quietly, without consulting your plans.
If everything was lost, then what remains is not failure.
What remains is sequence.
This is not a story of resilience.
It is a story of order.
Of time doing what time does.
And maybe that is enough for now: not a successful year ahead,
but a year that succeeds this one, faithfully, inevitably, without asking you to deserve it.
If this resonates with you, if you are tired of the performative way of stepping into the new year or setting grandiose goals for your best year yet, I invite you to a self-paced practice in allowing what comes next. You’re invited into a slow, honest practice of reconnection with integrity, desire, and the quiet joy of being a whole human again. This is your invitation to A Path To Success.
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