Until the 1580s, the word could mean a disaster as easily as a triumph.
The word "success" entered English in the 1530s from the Latin successus, the past participle of succedere, meaning to come after, to follow, or to move up from below.1 Its earliest English meaning was simply "result" or "outcome," with no indication of whether that outcome was good or bad. A military campaign could end in success whether the army won or lost.
The positive meaning, "accomplishment of a desired end," emerged by the 1580s through a process of ellipsis. People said "good success" so often that the adjective dropped away, and the word absorbed the positivity on its own. By the eighteenth century, the neutral sense was obsolete.2
William James wrote in 1906 of "the moral flabbiness born of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS," calling the narrow interpretation of the word the national disease of the United States.3
The meaning "a person who succeeds" appeared in 1882, turning an abstract outcome into a label applied to individuals.4 "Success story" followed in 1902.
The Latin root cedere means "to go" or "to yield," from the Proto-Indo-European root *ked-. The word is literally about movement, about what comes next. It carried no implication of merit, ambition, or individual achievement until English speakers gradually loaded those meanings onto it over the course of three centuries.5