What’s Standing In Your Way?

Think with me for a minute…what do you want in life? What are your aspirations? What do you want to become?

Undoubtedly there will be things in your way: hurdles, difficulty, hard work, thought, and failure. Expecting these things will make them easier to overcome as you reach them.

But think about this: everyone who has attained success has had a very specific number of these things to challenge them. Once you’ve reached your goal, you can look back and count exactly how many failures it took to get there.

So reverse this idea. Looking forward, there will be a specific number of failures and hardships standing between you and your goal. They aren’t infinite. There has to be an end to them somewhere. The reason some people are successful and others aren’t is because it takes tenacity and persistence to keep going, failure after failure. Life knocks everyone down a certain number of times before it lets them flourish.

So keep in mind that there are only so many failures you must pass by before you reach your goal. When you get there, you’ll be able to look back and count them. We tend to think of failure as the end, but there is always at least one more thing after failure: another failure, or success. “The desire to give up is greatest right before we reach success.” So get up just one more time, and maybe the next stop will be success.

In his commencement address to Stanford University, Steve Jobs said, “you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” It’s true. Someday you will look back, and each failure will be a dot along the line to success.

So keep failing. Never stop getting up when failure and hardship knock you down. The next dot may be another failure, but success must come eventually, and each failure will prepare you a little bit more for the reward. Keep pushing on: “nothing can resist a will that stakes even existence for its fulfillment.”

Written By Dan Simms

Check out Dan’s site “Irrational Living” and if you liked what you have read here make sure to let him know by giving him a follow over on Twitter @IrrationlLivng

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