What can tragedy teach us about success?

This seems like an odd question, because when one thinks about tragedy, the first thing one will think of is failure, no? This TED talk addresses the question of what tragedy can teach us about success. I think that the speaker does not address this question very directly, but he does bring up some good points about tragedy and success.

On the topic of personal tragedy, he says that our personal fears of failing spring from a general fear of being judged by others, and not being at the same place in the social hierarchy as one once was. This fear arises out of a need to feel significant in the eyes of those one meets through work of walking down the street. He also says that one person cannot be successful at everything, so you need to learn what is the important thing is to you and focus on that, and it's no tragedy if you don't do as well in other areas.

So what about success? He talks about that rather extensively. I would say that success, not tragedy, is the main emphasis of this talk. The speaker, in his short discussion on the Shakespearean play Hamlet, says about Hamlet that he is "not a loser, although he did lose." This shows his philosophy about failure, which is basically that if you fail graciously, then you may as well not really have failed, because you're not a loser in that case. Another quote that he said about success stuck out to me, which was "let's make sure that our ideas of success are truly our own." I'll leave it at that for now.