If At First You Don’t Succeed
When you set a goal for yourself, how many attempts to succeed are you willing to make before you quit? If you are prone to success, you already know the answer. If succeeding regularly eludes you, give some consideration to this example.
Thomas Edison, widely revered as one of the greatest inventors in history, made over one thousand unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb before he finally got it right. ONE THOUSAND attempts! If you’re like me, the only thing you feel like you’ve attempted one thousand times is that level on “Candy Crush” that just has to be broken…. there’s no way to solve it or I would have found it already, right? One thousand attempts at the light bulb, each with a result just as defeating as the last. You’d be reading this by candlelight if it weren’t for his ability to handle disappointment.
Reaching your destination
Why did he go on like that? Why didn’t he stop after the first failure, or the hundredth, or astonishingly, after five hundred failures? He didn’t quit because he kept two things firmly in mind. One that his goal was one worth achieving, and two, that disappointment and failure pave the road to success. He had learned that stumbling blocks only cause you to stumble if you haven’t properly laid them on your path to succeed. If you plan on succeeding then be prepared to fail, it’s going to happen.
When you reach your destination, what’s left behind you? The road. Will it be a path lined with gifts handed to you by a benevolent world with nothing in mind but your success? Not likely. The truth is that it will be a road lined with failure and disappointment and if you let the very path upon which you are traveling get in your way. You will never see its end. If your life is free of failed light bulbs and success is handed to you on a silver platter, congratulations. You are either royalty or a figment of someone’s imagination.
Effectively Dealing with Disappointment
If you do, however, live in the real world, remember this. How we deal with disappointment is just as important as the goals we set. If you can’t successfully deal with disappointment, you won’t succeed with your goals. I asked you a question earlier, do you have the answer yet?
How many attempts to succeed are you willing to make before you quit? The answer, if success is truly your passion, is as many as it takes and not one fewer.
