Right, as long as you remember not to look down on yourself, or more importantly, on others, if you or they do not succeed.
But my second point was a general comment about the popularity of the self-help/corporate/utilitarian discourse of "success", "usefulness", "improvement" etc.. You should improve yourself (if that's what you want), but don't become obsessed with improvement. There are other worthwhile and meaningful ways of living - just consider other options.
I'm afraid to sound new-agist ('cause I'm not), but let me suggest that the desire to improve is often the result of an external motivation such as competition. Also, "success", and "improvement" are common words in corporate-speak for two reasons: people who build corporations are often those who are obsessed with success to begin with, and second, people thinking about success and improvement tend to make better employees and better consumers. In general, people overly concerned with success and/or improvement either create authority or serve it well.
So improving yourself is certainly a great goal, but as you do it, make sure that you're improving yourself in order to serve yourself and those you love better - not someone else.
Ok, so I tried to learn PHP by creating a CRM program in that language. No really.... I succeeded in learning PHP. I was less successful in creating a CRM. Well, actually, I created a decent CRM for some markets, but failed at marketing it and eventually abandoned it. I didn't realize it at the time but this sort of thing is a key to my successes: I rarely take on a major project for one reason only. Instead I take them on for a myriad of reasons so even if the project fails, it's hardly a complete loss.
When I look back into the economic opportunities I "fell into" the same principle was at work. I did something, did it for two or three reasons, one fell through, another one became important, and suddenly my direction shifted. The same thing is now happening as well.....
In nature in a healthy ecosystem, no plant fills only a single niche, and no niche is filled by only a single species. I guess it took reading about permaculture to see some of my own patterns in a deeper light.
A pine tree very specifically only grows its vegetative part a few meters from the very top of the tree line. That's a very well defined niche.
A cave is mostly only inhabited by fungus. There you go, a niche only inhabited by a single kind of organism, and that's not even difficult to find.
Anyways, basing your behavior on how "things are in nature" is as insane as eating bark because you see a bear do it. It's stupid because analogies do not translate at all between things so distant as human and animal feeding patterns, or - in your case - yellowstone forest and business markets. Unless your CEO is Yogi Bear.
But my second point was a general comment about the popularity of the self-help/corporate/utilitarian discourse of "success", "usefulness", "improvement" etc.. You should improve yourself (if that's what you want), but don't become obsessed with improvement. There are other worthwhile and meaningful ways of living - just consider other options.
I'm afraid to sound new-agist ('cause I'm not), but let me suggest that the desire to improve is often the result of an external motivation such as competition. Also, "success", and "improvement" are common words in corporate-speak for two reasons: people who build corporations are often those who are obsessed with success to begin with, and second, people thinking about success and improvement tend to make better employees and better consumers. In general, people overly concerned with success and/or improvement either create authority or serve it well.
So improving yourself is certainly a great goal, but as you do it, make sure that you're improving yourself in order to serve yourself and those you love better - not someone else.