That's one of the great oddities of baseball: Success is relative. A hitter who fails 70 percent of the time at the plate is a potential member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and many World Championship teams lose more than 70 games during their title-winning seasons.
It's true that Americans are less than thrilled with President Obama and congressional Democrats. Their approval ratings are nothing to celebrate. But electoral politics is a zero-sum game. If one side loses, then the other side wins. Success depends on being just slightly less odious than your opponent.
I had a lot of success in big tournaments as well - won Masters Series in Rome - so a lot of things are coming together. I've done a lot of hard work in the off-season. A lot of physical work, a lot of work on my serve and on my return game.
This weird thing happens when you're in a movie that has some level of success. People start offering you all kinds of things, and they just expect you to do them because they'll be good for your career. It's not about the project's integrity or anything like that.
In America, as opposed to the old country, success was based on merit.
What little success I may have won in life I attribute to the loyalty I had for a dear old friend who was my first steel master, whom you perhaps have never heard of: Captain Bill Jones.
Every success story has a parent who says, 'over my dead body.' Every success story has an old person who walks up to you and says, when you're acting the fool, 'you know I worry about you sometimes.'
Chip maker Nvidia is the new old thing, an overnight success story years in the making that is having its moment and then some.
Success isn't about reaching your goals; it's about striving for things, like the joy of trying to raise a family, trying to be a successful singer, trying to write good songs, trying to be a better person. It's that old thing about life being about the journey, not the destination.
I think there's an awful lot of noise about the Church being persecuted but there is a more real issue that the conventional churches face - that the people who are really driving their revival and success believe in an old-time religion which, in my view, is incompatible with a modern, multi-ethnic, multicultural society.
Even my older brothers' early success 10 years ago didn't change me since there was such an age difference.
If you look at the success of snowboarding in the Winter Games and how that's brought a more youthful edge to the Olympics in general, they don't have that with the Summer Games. They don't have anything that's drawing in a younger viewership.
I'm totally comfortable today with the success that Omar and 'The Wire' have brought me - living with that character, being recognized and remembered for that character.
It's the price of success: people start to think you're omnipotent.
The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant and kind.
Success stems from the producer creating the optimal conditions for the filmmaker's own creative process. Not from steering the filmmaker through a one-size-fits-all approach.
I wish I had known that that process of figuring out what you're good at, what you want to do, and where you want to have an impact is not a one-time exercise, but an ongoing one. Instead, I bought into success being an endpoint rather than a constant process.
There are over 2,000 direct clones of the Groupon business model. However, there's an equal amount of proof that the barriers to success are enormous. In spite of all those competitors, only a handful are remotely relevant.
I do hope the success of 'Ms. Marvel' will open doors for other characters and other creators.
A lot of America's success is because we're an open society and haven't brought dogma or religious influence into the American political process.