Succeed Until You Succeed

It never occurred to me that I was failing in my musical endeavors.
When I first started playing bass, I played in a band with two of my friends in high school. We wrote a few songs, played them a bunch, and even recorded them onto tape with my father's old sound system. We never played a show, but we had some good stuff going and we had fun. The drummer went on to start another band and things fell apart for us.
A few years down the road, and many band attempts later, I decided to surf Craigslist for fun. After a while I noticed an ad for someone to play in a band covering songs from old Nintendo games. I responded and went to a house nearby to show off my prowess on the bass guitar. We started picking up members and eventually had gigs we went to. We still play a bunch, and I have a lot of fun, but how much success can you find playing covers of other peoples music?
I met Greg Fusillo in one of my writing courses, and eventually talked to him a bit. He displayed a small interest in the drums, and during one extended talk I offered to show him some of my songs and he could see what he could do with them. He quickly took to them and we started playing together. From there things kind of picked up, and we are starting to play gigs.
I never thought that the bands that happened before then were failures. They certainly didn't succeed in the measure of magnitude that we normally call "success," but I didn't consider that they were miscalculations of my time. I just thought they were things I did, and eventually the things I did lead to the places I wanted them to.

I've always had a little bit of a problem with the "Fail Until You Succeed" model of philosophy. For starters, it seems to me that the object of the model is that you qualify Success as one state of being, and Failure as another. It seems reasonable at first, that you would fail, try again, fail, and try again, and eventually succeed. But it ignores several important details.
1) Success is different for everyone. It's an important distinction to make that the measure of success you may be seeking could potentially be impossible. If you want to be the captain of the basketball team, and eventually you get it, that's a measure of success. But what if your idea of success isn't as clearly defined? What do you call success then? In the fail until you succeed model, success isn't clear. You just keep failing until... what, you get what you want? What if you don't know what you want?
2) Failure is abject. Whenever one fails, they retain a certain negativity to their failure, and tend to think of these past experiences as such. Failure connotes a lack of learning, a pessimism. Failure is the opposite of success, and in the fail until you succeed model, is treated as such. Failure is failure, and nobody enjoys failure.

I prefer to live by the succeed until you succeed model of philosophy. Here's what it looks like to me, using an experience most people go through:
Say you like a person, and so you smile at them. They frown back at you, displaying an obvious disinterest. In the fail until you succeed model, this is called a failure. In the succeed until you succeed model, this is a success. You have succeeded in showing your interest in someone by smiling at them.
A new person comes along in your life that you think would be a good mate. You smile at them, they smile back. Things seem good, so you make an approach and ask them out on a date. They turn you down. This is success. You have made a move, and despite being turned down, you now have the experience of asking someone on a date. Even better, you may also have gained a good friend.
Maybe further down the road you meet someone new, and they giggle at the right jokes. You smile and they smile back, and when you ask them out on a date they say yes. You have a good date and start a relationship, but after a week you start to feel like things are going sour. Neither of you are really enjoying the company of the other, and you think maybe it's best to cut things off before it gets too difficult to. Now you have experience with a relationship, you have a better idea of who you are compatible with, and you know more what to look for in a person who is interested in you as a mate.
Eventually you meet someone who is enjoyable, attractive, and who seems to like you quite a bit. You go on a few dates, start a relationship, and things work like any well-oiled machine. You make great friends, get along, and have all the usual inside jokes.
In the failure model, you have failed until you have succeeded. All those past attempts failed for the right reasons, and lead you to your success, but there is one crucial difference when you look at it from the succeed until you succeed model. All those past attempts were also successes. You learned something about yourself and about other people. You had experiences, and you were able to move past them to have more success in your later attempts at love. Success is much more positive.

Indeed, both models look very similar. Both have the same events, but one is a more enjoyable experience. Can we agree that success feels better than failure? If this new relationship doesn't blossom like it should and you both move on a year, maybe five years, later, would you consider it a waste of your time?
For your sake, I hope not. If it were a failure, you may think it is a waste of time. If it's a success, you may come away feeling dejected, but you will also have learned something about long relationships. You succeeded in having something special with someone. Your later relationships will have this built-in growth that the previous attempts did not.

The succeed until you succeed model works better for the main reason that success is quantifiable. If you start with mild success, eventually your success will grow, and you will have MORE success. Success is always happening. The fail until you succeed model requires you to fail until you achieve that one specified state of success. Failure is always happening.
If what you want most in this world is to succeed, then succeed. There is nothing stopping you except failure.