Everything you do in life is a combination of past experiences, choices you make, hard work and preparation. I am tired of all the people that believe things happen by luck or chance; or only to those that know the right people, have money, etc. Success is something that is earned not given or guaranteed, and most certainly not forever. Further, success is not a predetermined factor of something, nor is it defined the same from one person to another. Success could mean making a lot of money, moving up at your job, providing a valuable service or product to society -- bettering human kind; helping out friends and family, meeting the right person "soul mate", living in the city and neighborhood you choose and want to live in, graduating college/grad school/phd; hell, it could be getting 10,000 Twitter followers, who knows! Success could be anything, as a matter of fact one person's view of success may be anothers view of complete failure. It all depends on how you view life and what you want out of it while you're here.
The harsh reality of success is that you will, and should, fail; it's all about how you react to it, and how much tolerance you have for it. Do you get depressed and beat yourself up? Or do you say, I failed this time, and I learned this and that, now I'm going to do this. You can look at all of the ultra-successful people: Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, etc., and what you will find is that the amount of success they've had is directly related to the amount of their failures. Elon Musk almost went broke when Tesla hit a rough spot a few years ago -- investing his last $100 million. You can even look at the recent law upheld in Michigan that disallowed Tesla from selling its cars directly to consumers; do you think he will give up? Or will he use it as a motivator to drive his and Tesla's success? I believe it will be the latter. If people stopped doing what they were passionate about and at every misstep or roadblock, we'd still be riding horses, living in a segregated society; there'd be no smartphone, social networks, or personal computers for that matter. Look at the recent mishap with Virgin Galactic where a rocket plane exploded and killed the pilot. Do you think this will halt Virgin's progress on this venture? Should it? Absolutely not! Richard Branson actually said, "Space is hard but worth it. We will preserver and move forward." Virgin Galactic's CEO, George Whitesides, took it one step further by stating, "We owe it to the folks who were flying these vehicles, as well as those who have been working so hard on them, to understand this and move forward. And that is what we'll do." Could they have decided to stop everything and reevaluate their decision to bring space travel to the everyday (rich) consumer? Yes, absolutely, however, they CHOSE not to; they CHOSE to move forward and learn from their mistakes and persevere.
That is the whole point. It is the choice of the individual to succeed or give-up. So you lost your job or went through a bad break-up, what you do next and how you react is up to you; it is your choice. Which brings me to something else that is relative to choice, and that is experts are not born. Michael Jordan did not come out of the womb crossing people over and dunking on them; he busted his ass day in and day out -- he earned being the best. He chose to put in the work, accept failure, and was never satisfied with where he was at -- he remained hungry. There are countless of individuals that reached the top by ignoring all the critics and just putting their heads down, focusing on mastering their desired skill.
The real test is how many times can you accept failure before you say screw it, I'm going to give up or try something else. How determined are you to get what you want out of life? According to one of the greatest thought-leaders of our time on success, Napoleon Hill, most people will give up at or before the 3rd failure. If you think about it, this truly holds ground when you think of the amount of people that have a job they can't stand, but are frozen in fear of what the other side looks like -- the unknown. The numbers are actually staggering, as over 70% of Americans hate their jobs! To me this is astounding, particularly since we spend over a third of our lives at work, and that third is of the most precious as that is when we are young and healthy enough to enjoy our lives and do things that actually mean something, make us happy, etc.
All this goes back to our mindsets: Do you believe in limitations? Are you afraid to try something new? Are you a leader or a follower? When approached with a challenge do you accept it graciously regardless of the potential of failure? Or do you runaway and accept that you will never be able to do it and would rather avert the potential of being seen as a failure? The choice is yours! I know what I would do!
Whew! I would say I apologize for the rant but I won't, as I feel very strongly about this; no matter what people may say or the outcome, the choice is yours whether or not to do something that you feel passionate about.
Hopefully this motivates someone, or at the very least gets others to think about their current situation, where they are at and what they want to do. The purpose of every human beings life should be to reach their absolute potential -- not to mention it would be good for the world and the economy.
Remember, it's not how many times you get knocked down, all that matters is that you get up one more time.
Until next time.
Cheers,
ModernManTellsAll
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