What we believe as the secret of success is not the secret of success at all.It's just ordinary cause-effect relationship. If you have a goal, if you prepare, organize, and if you concentrate all your effort, mind and energy, you will achieve your goal.
What is the real secret of success?
The real secret of success is: you don't have to be successful!
The first step toward the journey to the ultimate meaning of your life: give up your pursuit of success!
Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.
The score is not what matters. Life does not have to be regarded as a game in which scores are kept and somebody wins. If you are too intent on winning, you will never enjoy playing. If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be successful, your life life has probably been wasted. If a university concentrates on producing successful people, it is lamentably failing in its obligation to society and to students themselves.
Thomas Merton, Love and Living, Farrar-Strauss-Giroux, New York(1979).