Secret Behind Success

Our lives are filled with emotions of all sorts. They are so powerful that they determine our professional output as well. Have you ever wondered why you are not able to concentrate on studies or on your job when you are going through a tough phase of your life? All this is because no matter how hard you try, your personal life would always have an impact on your professional life and vice versa. I am in no way implying that a person must be emotionless for achieving success. After all, emotions drive a man’s hunger for success. However, if left uncontrolled, emotions have the capacity to hurt a person’s progress as well. One of the problems with emotions is that the negative emotions are extremely overwhelming while the positive emotions are usually short-lived. You would have experienced it for yourself—good news cheers you up for a few minutes or hours but bad news can turn your mood gloomy for several days, if not weeks.

Thus, it is extremely important to have an ability to handle disappointment in one aspect of your life without letting it impact the other aspect of your life. Disappointment is an emotion that many of us have a difficult time in understanding and managing. However, handling disappointment is easier said than done. The very first step to overcome your disappointment is to admit it honestly and openly. Just hiding your disappointment is not going to make it go away. Rather, question yourself why you are disappointed and what the outcome was that you were hoping for in this situation. Were your expectations too high or was your outcome too low? It is extremely important to ask yourself these questions if you do not want to repeat this situation. For instance, if your aim was to push the wall back through your efforts and you are disappointed because you could not do it, your mistake lies in your expectations and not in your efforts. Thus, identify where you went wrong in order to correct that.

The bigger the goal you are aiming for, the more efforts and intermittent disappointments it would take to reach that ultimate goal. If you are planning to reach Mars, you should be ready to face certain failures in the process. In order to succeed spectacularly, you must be willing to fail spectacularly. It was more than 30 years after Gandhiji’s arrival in India that we managed to finally attain independence. In his fight against the British rule, he faced a number of failures, from Non-Cooperation Movement to the Civil Disobedience Movement and the innumerable hunger strikes he kept; none of them were able to fetch complete independence for India. However, he never lost hope because he had his eyes set on the bigger goal and was aware that a goal as big as getting independence for the country surely requires certain sacrifices. He never let his failures get on his nerves.

Arguably the greatest inventor that the world has ever seen, Thomas Edison had an extraordinarily positive perception of life which helped him work as an inventor. There would have been many inventors in his era who were terribly discouraged after failing multiple times in an attempt to develop an electric light, but the great Edison simply viewed each unsuccessful experiment as the elimination of a solution that would not work, thereby moving him much closer to a successful solution. There are some amazing lessons hidden in the life of Edison. You can come across hundreds of stories about inventors who quit trying and gave up too soon or miners who struck gold just a few feet beyond where someone else quit digging. When you are discouraged after you have failed at something, remember that the world got an incandescent electric light bulb only because Edison did not give up even after 1,000 failures. He knew that every single attempt was only taking him closer to the dream that he had been after for so many years. If you leave your job half done, you are only creating an easier path for the person trying after you to gain all the glory that you deserved. Thus arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached.