The road to investing success is paved with mountains, molehills, and ditches. If you only invest in secure stocks, your money probably won't skyrocket, but it will grow at a solid and steady pace. If you have more of an appetite for risk, you're likely to face many ups and downs, but even one amazing growth stock can deliver enormous, life-changing gains for your investing account.

That's why it's important to diversify. If you make any unfortunate investing decisions, the good ones should more than balance them out. It's also important to invest for the long term, which gives your stocks the best chance at success. Looking back over the past eight years that (NASDAQ: PYPL) has been a public company, it hasn't been the success investors were hoping for. Let's see what that means and if it can change. 

When I talk about PayPal going public, I mean for the second time. PayPal first went public in 2002, but was acquired soon after by online marketplace eBay. It was spun off as a separate company and had another initial public offering (IPO) in 2015, so PayPal as a stock is really fairly young.

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Source Fool.com