Invoice Gates Realized at an Early Age This Lesson That Takes Most Individuals a Lifetime. Some Individuals By no means Do

You can say what you want about Bill Gates, but it’s hard to argue that he’s unsuccessful. He is one of the richest people in the world and co-founded one of the most valuable companies in the world. He now spends his time giving all of this money away for causes like polio eradication. His resume isn’t bad.

Much of this achievement came from a simple lesson Bill Gates learned early in his life. I think it’s worth a look, especially since a lot of people will have a lifetime of learning if they ever do.

Most of us assume that is the case, which means that anything that doesn’t succeed has to be a failure. However, the opposite of success is not a failure. Or it doesn’t have to be. And that’s a distinction that can make all the difference. Unfortunately, it’s one that many people never learn to do.

Most people measure success by whatever the equivalent in their task is to shoot an arrow and hit the center of the target. There is very little room for error: you either hit it or you haven’t. If that’s the case, everything else is a mistake. This belief often scares us into trying, because success is narrowly defined as just getting the best possible result.

However, in most cases the success is incremental. You try something and it works, you take a step forward. You try something different and it doesn’t work so learn something and look for more things like the first try. Eventually you will get where you were going.

This leads to another reason why success is not binary: in many cases it is impossible to understand the best possible outcome. Indeed, there are many things that are not considered “success” but should not be defined as failure either.

Take Microsoft for example. There was no way of knowing when Bill Gates and Paul Allen were going to start a software company that would become what it is today. Many of the factors that helped make Microsoft one of the largest and most valuable companies in the world didn’t even exist back then.

On the other hand, dropping out of college Gates after two years could easily have been viewed as a failure. Except that it still brought Gates closer to his destination, even if it was difficult to see at the time.

Microsoft wasn’t even the first company Gates and Allen founded. The couple first started a company called Traf-O-Data, which produced reports based on studying data from traffic meters. If you’re wondering why you’ve never heard of this successful business, it’s because it hasn’t. But it drove the couple to start what would become one of the most successful companies of all time.

Looking back, years later, Gates said, “It’s okay to celebrate success, but it’s more important to heed the lessons of failure.”

This is a powerful lesson, but it is difficult for many of us to learn. There are very few, if any, overnight successes. There are also very few overnight failures. Understanding that is just as important.

The opinions expressed by Inc.com columnists here are their own, not those of Inc.com.