Best quotes about Success Anxiety Cycle

Best Success Anxiety Cycle Quotes

Success Anxiety Cycle By Patrick Wright01/05/2026

Success Anxiety Cycle

Table of Contents

Fear of Success and Failure

How many of us stop short of success on purpose? How many of us sabotage our own happiness because failure, while miserable, is a fear we're familiar with? Success, however, dreams come true, are a whole new kind of terrifying, an entire new species of responsibilities and disillusions, requiring a new way to think, act and become. Why do we REALLY quit? Because it's hopeless? Or because it's possible...

True success is overcoming the fear of being successful.

I think the worst enemy for success is the anxiousness to get it.

Success on a cosmic level completely eludes me. I'm deeply suspicious of things being too good. It's part of my superstition, I think, to generate pain in order to give the illusion of gain. I'm not saying I reject success, but honestly, I don't quite know how to deal with it. It's an old feeling: As soon as you have the thing you've been going after all your life, that reasonable degree of security, you start kicking against it, doubting it.

Success is a very scary thing especially after you choose something and everything starts coming at you. It's absolutely frightening because the mind does things. It says, 'You've got to hold on to this or get away from this.

Success can be wracking and reproachful, to you and those close to you. It can entangle you with legends that are consuming and all but impossible to live up to.

Fear of success is one of the new fears I've heard about lately. And I think its definitely a sign that we're running out of fears. A person suffering from fear of success is scraping the bottom of the fear barrel.

True success is overcoming the fear of being unsuccessful.

It's what we live and what we do. When you're not successful, it hurts ... hurts a lot.

Sometimes adversity is what you need to face in order to become successful.

Success and Stress

If you're successful and stressed out, you're succeeding in spite of your stress, not because of it.

The worst part of success is, to me, adapting to it. It's scary.

In fact, people think you have to be stressed to be successful. They think if you are not stressed, something is wrong with you.

If you’re successful and stressed out, you’re succeeding in spite of your stress, not because of it.

In a lot of ways, success is much harder than I thought it would be. I figured that you'd get here and then everything would be happily ever after. But, it's hard work, almost harder once you're successful because you've got to maintain it.

Success is sometimes harder than failure, because when you are successful, people expect so much more out of you.

When success comes, people can try to trick you or take advantage of you.

Success Requires Effort and Perseverance

Success doesn’t happen by accident. You make it happen. But before you reach that road to victory, some things about yourself have to be changed.

Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do

To be successful is never convenient. The things you have to go through, it’s never convenient.

A person has to remember that the road to success is always under construction. You have to get that through your head. That it is not easy becoming successful.

Success is not an accident. It is the result of your attitude and your attitude is a choice. Hence sucess is a matter of choice and not chance.

To be successful is never convenient. The things you have to go through, it's never convenient.

Success is hastened or delayed by one’s habits. It is not your passing inspirations or brilliant ideas so much as your everyday mental habits that control your life.

Creating success is tough. But keeping it is tougher. You have to keep producing, you can't ever stop.

Success involves avoiding the lure of making excuses.

Success and Complacency

I think it's dangerous to think that you're successful, because then you become complacent.

One of the biggest threats to success is success itself. When you get a little bit ahead, it's all too easy to become complacent and to quickly lose what you have gained.

Success lulls you. It makes the most ambitious of us complacent and sloppy. In a way, you have to cultivate a kind of amnesia and forget all of your previous prosperity.

When you're very successful, you become careless and try to turn many things into routine.

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.

Success can cause people to unlearn the habits that made them successful in the first place

Success through Failure

It is true that success is the most boring thing, it is tinny and brittle, failure runs deeper. Success is dangerous. I have a very complicated relationship with that word.

The cost of success is that I must be willing to fail far more times than I succeed, which is why so few of us are successful.

Succeeding is not really a life experience that does that much good. Failing is a much more sobering and enlightening experience.

To define your success, it truly is define by what you believe is your failures. This is what can make you weaker or stronger. The choice is yours and yours alone. We must sometimes fail more than once to succeed, so that we may grow and learn to change everything. As Thomas Edison once said; “I have not failed 10,000 ways, I just found 10,000 ways that does not work.

Many people dream of success. To me, success can only be achieved through repeated failure and introspection.

Sometimes adversity is what you need to face in order to become successful.

It is easier to move from failure to success in from excuses to success.

To be successful at anything, you need the right to fail, not just occasionally.

Success and Luck

Success isn't supposed to happen, no matter how hard you work. There's no guarantee you're going to succeed. There's nothing set in stone.

I needn't tell you that success and failure prove nothing - the whole thing is a lottery. It's pleasant to succeed; but for a philosophic mind it oughtn't to be very upsetting to fail.

The truth is, success often occurs for reasons we don't expect, under circumstances over which we have little control and sometimes unrelated to our own efforts. There is only one other lesson that success should teach us: Be as amazed by your own success as your friends are. If you truly are, you stand the best chance to repeat it.

The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape

Success is ultimately realized by people who make more good choices and recover quickly from their bad choices. Our personal and professional success depends on repeating good choices, day in and day out, and avoiding repetition of bad choices.

The old saying that “success breeds success” has something to it. It’s that feeling of confidence that can banish negativity and procrastination and get you going the right way.

If your success is as a result of a trail of tears & hurt you left in anothers life, Karmas' watching.

If you want to be successful, you need to study success, not hate it or be envious of it. If you are envious, then you will distance yourself from success and make it that much harder to get there. Never be jealous. Never think someone is “lucky.” Luck is created by the prepared. Never think that someone is undeserving of the money they have. That only puts you one more.

Success and Choices

Success is an outcome of conscious choices pursued consistently and tirelessly.

Success has less to do with what we can get ourselves to do and more to do with keeping ourselves from doing what we shouldn’t.

Success is ultimately realized by people who make more good choices and recover quickly from their bad choices. Our personal and professional success depends on repeating good choices, day in and day out, and avoiding repetition of bad choices.

Success is assured when a person fears the pain of regret more than the pain of the process.

Success is not an accident. It is the result of your attitude and your attitude is a choice. Hence sucess is a matter of choice and not chance.

You will never become successful as long as you continue to blame someone or something else for your lack of success.

Success is what happens when you overcome list of excuses why you cannot succeed with the excuse why you must succeed

Success and Resilience

The best predictor of success is a sense of resiliency, grit, capacity to fail and get up. If you're prevented from feeling discomfort of failure, you have no sense of how to handle those things at all.

Success in life is your delight to keep pushing despite the odd.

Success comes to those who are willing to launch toward their goals with no guarantees of success - and persist when there is every reason to give up.

Success is just a war of attrition. Sure, there's an element of talent you should probably possess. But if you just stick around long enough, eventually something is going to happen.

Success often comes to those who dare to act. It seldom goes to the timid who are ever afraid of the consequences.

Successful people take big risks knowing that they might fall hard. But, they might succeed more than they ever dreamed, too.

Obstacles are necessary for success because in selling, as in all careers of importance, victory comes only after many struggles and countless defeats. Yet each struggle, each defeat, sharpens your skills and strengths, your courage and your endurance, your ability and your confidence and thus each obstacle is a comrade-in-arms forcing you to become better... or quit. Each rebuff is an opportunity to move forward; turn away from them, avoid them, and you throw away your future.

When you want success as bad as you want to breathe, then you will be successful.

Success and Responsibility

Success is sometimes harder than failure, because when you are successful, people expect so much more out of you.

Sometimes, success almost haunts you. You want to be the best at everything you do and know you have to work hard.

In a lot of ways, success is much harder than I thought it would be. I figured that you'd get here and then everything would be happily ever after. But, it's hard work, almost harder once you're successful because you've got to maintain it.

The worst part of success is, to me, adapting to it. It's scary.

Success can be wracking and reproachful, to you and those close to you. It can entangle you with legends that are consuming and all but impossible to live up to.

Unless one is taught what to do with success after getting it, achievement of it must inevitably leave him prey to boredom.

Success as a Journey

Success isn't something you chase. It's something you have to put forth the effort for constantly. Then maybe it'll come when you least expect it. Most people don't understand that.

Success is never an accident. It typically starts as imagination, becomes a dream, stimulates a goal, grows into a plan of action - which then inevitably meets with opportunity. Don't get stuck along the way.

Success isn't something you have, it's something you do. Don't be fooled into taking shortcuts, they always lead to a dead-end. Instead, establish a goal, make a plan, and take purposeful action. Those who experience success are those who live it; those who earn it.

A person has to remember that the road to success is always under construction. You have to get that through your head. That it is not easy becoming successful.

Success is never an accident. It typically starts as imagination, becomes a dream, stimulates a goal, grows into a plan of action – which then inevitably meets with opportunity. Don’t get stuck along the way.

It is the 'follow through' that makes the great difference between ultimate success and failure, because it is so easy to stop.

Other

When others walk away from a lost cause, then that is the time you can step in and seize success.

Sometimes success demands a certain refined insanity.

Success is an addiction. Once you get into the habit of success, you can’t stop.

In good times as well as in bad times, the basics of success remains the same. When you are caught up in the rat race and totally immersed in chasing your goals, it is highly likely that you might be missing the very basics that will define your success.

My definition of success is not based on achieving the impossible, but rather surviving the probable. And with a threshold that horribly low, simple survival cannot help but become my highest aspiration.

Success is shown to us as a straight line, heading in one direction, up. There are no detours, no turn-arounds, no missteps allowed. ... When you aren’t allowed to fail, either due to the expectations of others or yourself, although it may seem like you are being pragmatic and focusing on how to succeed, you are actually making it that much harder for yourself.

Your mind wants to succeed, but your life does not want; how will you succeed? Success is not an easy thing! Success is allergic to laziness! However, it is amenable to intelligence and diligence.

Being successful is nothing but an act of removing the illusion that something is impossible.

Without self-discipline, success is impossible, period.

Being success is not an easy thing. It need courage, fight, brave, and time. Let them judge. Just show them the result later. Because a wise man said that success is the biggest revenge.

You can be successful if you are good at knowing what sort of things to let go to your head and to your heart; letting success go to your head will result in a failure, similarly letting failure go to your heart will never lead to success.

I realized that success is not a one-time act or a moment of luck and that "Overnight Success" is never true. Success is created through and by creating a habit caused by proper self-discipline.

If you are strong enough to face Fear of Failure, Fear of Rejections, and Fear of Criticism, that's the sign of Success.

Don't let success go to your head and failure to your heart." - Will Smith.

If success were easy, everybody would do it. Because it’s not, you have the opportunity to distinguish yourself by solving problems. The more problems you solve, the more success you’ll have in life.Then, once you’re successful, you won’t have any more problems, right? Wrong. But if you’re lucky, you’ll have a better class of problems.

Internalising success means that even if a misfortune takes away all the evidence or traces of success, yet what made you successful, remains. Soon enough, the evidence will return.

Achieving success is hard; staying successful is even harder.

I started to experience success when I Stopped being afraid of failure. I quit making excuses of not starting, like I was to broke, to busy, Etc ... I started Succeeding when I turned those excuses of Failure into Reasons for me To Get off My Butt, Make it happen and Succeed. Success is a process. Its not a Place or thing that you arrive At or Have. It's during the Journey and Struggles that Success is Made

There's a simple, but oft-neglected lesson here: to sustain success, you have to be willing to abandon things that are no longer successful.

When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, then you will be successful.

Creating success is a tug of war between your mind and your heart-your fears and your dreams. If your fears win, you lose.

A lot of people think that success is luck and being in the right place at the right time. But I think if you’re willing to work harder than anybody else, you can create an awful lot of your own luck.

In terms of success and drive, I think some people are born with it, sometimes certain circumstances push you towards success... trying to prove people wrong. I'm not exactly sure where mine comes from, but, I have this thing inside of me that, when someone tells me that I can't do something, I become obsessed with proving them wrong. It's a weird thing.

Success is not an accident. When you put yourself in the right place at the right time, then you're likely to be more successful because of how you prepare yourself on a daily basis.

I think it's better to be overly ambitious and fail than to be underambitious and succeed in a mundane way. I have been very fortunate. I failed upward in my life!

Nobody tells you when success comes around; in its transient way, you're just working and exhausted all the time. Sometimes I think I'm just sleeping in the back of cars, d'you know what I mean?

Success in life is the ability to move from one mistake to another without loosing enthusiasm.

When you have success, people think you know what you're doing, and you start to agree with them, you think you can conquer the world. But you go from grandiosity to panic.

I don't think anybody should do what they do in hopes of being successful. But I always expect myself to be successful at things. And if I'm not, I feel bad. I don't care for failure. I've failed at a number of things, and it's not my favorite state of mind. So I prefer success.

People don't know the consolations of being unsuccessful ... If I had been successful I should have had no peace or time.

Success is doing what it takes in spite of one's fear.

I think that’s the only way you can ever be truly successful in this world. You have to acknowledge that it is from above. And you have to have the confidence that even if you lose it all, things will be okay. You have to be willing to fail, and all the while work your tail off to succeed.

Nothing is more fatal to success than taking one's job as a matter of course.

When you want success as badly as you want the air, then you will get it. There is no other secret of success.

Success is a sort of metaphysical experience. I live exactly as I did before - only on a slightly bigger scale. Naturally, I won't be corrupted. I'll sit there in my Rolls, uncorrupted, and tell my chauffeur, uncorruptedly, where to go.

If you consistently and persistently do the things that other successful people do, nothing in the world can stop you from being a big success also.

The law of cause and effect: If you do what other successful people do, you will eventually get the results that other successful people get.

The old saying that "success breeds success" has something to it. It's that feeling of confidence that can banish negativity and procrastination and get you going the right way.

When the need to succeed is as bad as the need to breathe, then you'll be successful.

To succeed in life requires a total inability to do anything that makes you uncomfortable when you look at yourself in the mirror.

When you're around enormously successful people you realise their success isn't an accident - it's about work.

Success is not a pie with a limited number of pieces. The success of others has very little bearing on your success. You and everyone you know can become successful without anyone suffering setbacks, harm, or downturns.

It's funny because when you do become successful, you're forced to look backwards and try to crawl back into the womb where you first started to create.

The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape.

It is the ‘follow through’ that makes the great difference between ultimate success and failure, because it is so easy to stop.

Nothing is more fatal to success than taking one’s job as a matter of course.

Success is just a war of attrition. Sure, there’s an element of talent you should probably possess. But if you just stick around long enough, eventually something is going to happen.

But most people live a life of quiet mediocrity and never achieve the success they truly desire because they get impatient. They want easy success or none at all. They see the path to success as a frustration, an impediment. Each day spent short of the ultimate goal is viewed as a time of failure and as an annoyance. As such, they get distracted by hundreds of little things that each day try to get us off our course. Yet the successful among us know the truth:.

Success isn’t something you chase. It’s something you have to put forth the effort for constantly. Then maybe it’ll come when you least expect it. Most people don’t understand that.

I think it’s better to be overly ambitious and fail than to be underambitious and succeed in a mundane way. I have been very fortunate. I failed upward in my life!

There’s a simple, but oft-neglected lesson here: to sustain success, you have to be willing to abandon things that are no longer successful.

I needn’t tell you that success and failure prove nothing – the whole thing is a lottery. It’s pleasant to succeed; but for a philosophic mind it oughtn’t to be very upsetting to fail.

It’s funny because when you do become successful, you’re forced to look backwards and try to crawl back into the womb where you first started to create.

More Collections

Friendship Quotes Hub

Friendship Quotes Hub

Sports Team Confidence & Success Quotes

Sports Team Confidence & Success Quotes

Persistence and Progress

Persistence and Progress

Best Limited Social Circles Quotes

Best Limited Social Circles Quotes

Best Life Quotes

Best Life Quotes

Best Intense Rivalry Games Quotes

Best Intense Rivalry Games Quotes

Written by

Patrick Wright

Software engineer and creator of Quotesperation. I curate wisdom from history's greatest minds to inspire and guide modern life. When I'm not collecting quotes, I'm writing about technology and finding connections between timeless wisdom and today's challenges.