Thoughts for Success: The Price of Failure Is Higher Than the Price of Success

So often I’ll hear someone ask, “Why is that woman successful? I’m just as talented, skilled and inventive as she is, so why not me?” There’s a pretty simple reason why, but it’s not one that most people are comfortable with. There is a price to success – a price not all are willing to pay. The truth is the idea of starting a legal nurse consultant business is the easy part.

The fun is in dreaming the dream and enjoying the visions in your mind. Then the reality check comes along with the late nights, early mornings and working weekends – getting your hands dirty with the details. You start to miss birthdays, weddings, funerals and the occasional happy hour. That’s the tipping point when the casually engaged fall slack while the tenaciously persistent grab the prize and run.

While I was willing to pay the price of success for my legal nurse consulting business, I do understand the price of failure. You see I’d gone into nursing wide-eyed, thinking I’d have fun, make a real difference, cure people, help people to be healthier and, in my grandest ambition, even improve the state of healthcare, only to bump up against the reality that no matter how hard I worked, my efforts would never make a dent, much less an impact.

I was too mouthy and opinionated for an institutionalized system that only rewarded me when I kept my opinions to myself. I was also moving far too slowly toward financial success, having to work overtime just to pay the mortgage on my 1,100 sq ft condo, and I was forgetting what it was like to have fun on the job.

Forget waking up early, raring to get to work. I was waking up 10 minutes before it was time to rush out the door and rolling into work a little disheveled, no make-up and, if I didn’t chug down at least one cup of coffee (sometimes freeze-dried straight out of the bottle), a little crazed. Looking in the mirror at a woman I didn’t recognize, I asked her, “What’s happened to me?” That’s when I decided to start my legal nurse consulting business.

It wasn’t easy, but I did have a choice – work hard at the hospital for little payoff or work harder for myself. When I posed the choice that way it was a no-brainer. Yes I paid a price for success, but that price was cheap compared to the alternative – the psychological cost of staying at the hospital having to swallow my dreams, pride and individuality with little to look forward to except white cake and alcohol-free punch at a hospital retirement party.

RNs ask “Vickie, how did you do it?” and my response is always the same, “36 years of engaging the details every day.” Next year the only difference will be 37 years instead of 36 years.

If you’re not willing to pay the price that success demands, you’ll pay a price for failure. I’ll always choose living a lifetime of tried and might fail than one of won’t try so I’ll never have to experience failure. Which do you choose – the price of success or the price of failure?

Success Is Yours!

P.S. Comment and share the price you’re willing to pay to succeed as a legal nurse consultant.