Article 178 - It's not as easy as it may seem

Exhibit success achieve without sharing the back story of a real struggle and compromise

​What may seem to many of us as overnight success, in reality is the result of many months or even years of extreme hard work, sleepless nights, early mornings, stress, fear, ups and downs, fears, and never-give-up attitude. What we often see or are allowed to see is the tip of the iceberg, but there’s so much more to the iceberg that we don’t see and don’t know that’s hiding below the surface. The thing is, many of us don’t even care to learn about struggles and failures on someone’s path to success. Why? Because, we don’t want to learn about things and obstacles that someone had to go through before they had reached success. We don’t want to see how difficult it was, much hard work such success requires. We want to see the end result, where everyone is happy, accomplished, and successful, because, it motivates us to pursue our own goals and dreams of being successful as well. However, after brief period of time of us trying and working towards our goals, we give up, we stop trying, because, we find out how difficult things really are and how much effort is actually required. We didn’t know that before, or should I say, we never cared about learning individuals who have reached success. We never asked them how they did it and what they had to go through.

When we do actually inquire, we learn about long and often very challenging journey that another individual had to travel before reaching their goal(s). Therefore, we should never assume that success, money, and happiness just happen because one day someone wanted to become successful, and things just happened magically for them. It doesn’t happen that way, even when you were happened to be at the right place at the right time. We must remember that success is the end result of many components mentioned earlier, as well as being fortunate enough to create an opportunity to pursue our goals and dreams in life.

That’s right, opportunities do not just come our way waiting for us to accept them. Opportunities are created by us taking action, creating a plan, and following through on the action items that we’ve committed to completing. Just like with goal setting, it’s not enough to just want something one day and say that we have a goal which we are pursuing. Goals must be well thought out through carefully analyzed, prioritized, and written down on paper or typed in the word document. So, if we want to create opportunities for ourselves which would allow us to pursue our goals and dreams, we must seek out such opportunities proactively every day, wherever we may be, and if such opportunities cannot be quickly found, we must look for ways to create them. For example, if we always wanted to write a book on a particular subject that we are passionate about, but we find ourselves to be always busy with other important things, other responsibilities and obligations at work or at home where we cannot find few minutes each day or week to focus and write, then we must create time. Perhaps, one way we may be able to create time is by going to a library or another quiet place, let everyone that needs to know that you will not be available for a specific period of time, and make such activity a part of your daily or weekly schedule. Make this your time, even if it’s just for a few minutes each week. During this time your goal is to fully focus on your thoughts and ideas and put them in writing. This is not the time to check your phone for updates, read emails, or browse social media applications. Even with busiest schedules we can find just few minutes each day or week when we can spend planning and creating our own successful future. This is how opportunities can be created even in most challenging and busy times.
​
So, next time when you meet or see a highly successful individual, don’t just focus your attention on the end result – their success, but instead make a goal for yourself to learn about their journey towards that success. If you have an opportunity to speak with a successful individual, then ask them how they did it, and what challenges and/or roadblocks  they had to overcome, or persona sacrifices they had to make before they could become successful. And, always remember, behind every success story often lies many days, weeks, months, or even years of hard work, persistence, extreme determination, and struggle. Understanding the price of success, you should be able to draft your own plan of achieving success and happiness in life that you hope to achieve one day.

---

Let me know if you had found this article useful for you or someone else that you may know. If so, please feel free to share this post if you know someone who may benefit from reading it same way you did