What Stops us from Success & Fulfilling our Dreams and Desires?

Some people believe they don’t deserve success. Some people believe that they lack the confidence they think they need to achieve success. Others are simply afraid to take the first step, afraid they’ll fail and then what?

Would you believe that the difference between every single person who has succeeded and those who haven’t is the one single quality of perseverance. Not courage, not luck, not social influence or any other quality because each of those qualities come naturally once you acquire an attitude of perseverance. Perseverance is the absolute refusal to give up.

Sure one can view results as failure, mistakes or successes. The problem with using words such as failure or mistakes is the attitude that often accompanies them. The common myth that desperately screams for debunking is - that if you fail at something, then you will always fail and so you should quit. If this was a truism, a real wisdom to be followed – then we’d likely be still living in caves and wishing there was something better to eat than raw meat and grass shoots. You see, we wouldn’t have had fire because everyone would have given up on trying to keeping it going, once it was discovered and it would be unheard of to start another – after all, what if you failed? Come to think of it, we’d likely still be crawling because surely, we wouldn’t have achieved walking on our first try ….

Sounds ridiculous when put in those terms doesn’t it? Yet, if you think about it, babies must learn to walk and they fall many times before they get it right. Toilet training a child or even pet takes more than one attempt and yet we continue to pursue those efforts. Why? Because we believe they are achievable and we persevere until we succeed.

That’s different (we argue) than achieving a successful career. How is it different? To the parent, finally having their child toilet trained is just as large of an accomplishment as getting your first client. Perspective. To the child learning how to walk, it’s the biggest accomplishment and toughest accomplishment so far in their lives. That is no small goal. To the student completing high school or passing a test or asking a person for a date – these accomplishments are just as great as getting a job or starting a business or anything else.

The reality is that very few people achieve success on their first attempt. All of the inventors, scientists and revolutionaries who have made large and small contributions to the evolution of our world – more than likely didn’t succeed on their first attempt. Walt Disney, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Richard Bach , Winston Churchill, Henry Ford, Beethoven and Helen Keller are only a few of the countless, famous & successful people who experienced and overcame adversity, rejection, personal and financial limitations and many attempts at success.

Thaddeus Wawro wrote a wonderful book that I highly recommend to everyone called, “Radicals and Visionaries: Entrepreneurs Who Revolutionized the 20th Century”. This book contains story after story of different individuals, people just like you and I, who dared to dream of achieving a goal and continued to pursue that dream until they achieved it and then spring boarded to success beyond that. Perseverance.

Perseverance will not be adequate if you do not modify your actions if your results are not favorable. Unfavorable results does not mean that you have failed, it means that you need to change something before you carry on. The essential component that must accompany perseverance is to be keenly aware of the results and modify actions if the results are unfavorable. It is the dogged dedication to continue to monitor results and make changes until the right combination is achieved.

Given the wonderful gifts to humanity those who persevered brought us, just think about how much we are likely missing out on from all of those people who had great ideas and never saw them through.

By Marisa Broughton, CMHT