Over
the past five years I have dealt with
several severe hardships, including the sudden death of my parents , the loss
of a best friend to illness and betrayal from a business partner. These
experiences were brutal. Each of them, unsurprisingly, knocked me down.
But when my time of mourning was over after each tragedy, i pressed forward,
stronger, and with a greater understanding and respect for life. So my challenge to you today is this:
Start looking at life’s harsh realities and toughest challenges as friends that
are going to help you grow. Here are some thoughts to consider….........>>>>>>>>
The first step is never
easy.
The beginnings to good things are always the hardest, but it’s
these hard times that pave the path to greatness. Be strong and keep the
faith. It will be worth it in the end. The greatest miracle of your
success in life will not be that you finished, it will be that you found the
strength and courage to begin. And remember, it’s not that those who are strong
never get weak in the knees, or that they never hold their breath before they
embark… It’s that while their knees are shaking, they force themselves to
breathe and take the first step.
Good things rarely come quick and easy.
Life is not easy, but it’s worth
it. If you expect it to be, you will perpetually disappoint
yourself. Achieving anything worthwhile in life takes time and
effort. You must align your efforts with your goals and then start every
day ready to run farther
than you did yesterday and fight harder than you ever have before.
Persistence is the single most common
characteristic of high achievers. They simply refuse to give up.
The longer you hang in there, the greater the chance that something will happen
in your favor. Success is the good fortune that comes from aspiration,
desperation, perspiration and inspiration. No matter how hard it seems,
the more you persist, the more likely your success.
You will always have less control than you desire.
The only
thing you can absolutely control in life is how you react to things out of your
control, and there’s a lot you can’t control. The better you adapt to
this reality, the more powerful your highs will be, and the more quickly you’ll
be able to bounce back from the lows. Put most simply: Living a happy,
fulfilling life means being in a state of complete acceptance of all that is,
right here, right now. As your life unfolds, you will often realize that many
of the times you thought you were being rejected from something good, you were
in fact being redirected to something better. You don’t have to control
everything to find peace and happiness. You just need to do you best, and
then relax and have faith that things will work out. Let go and just let
life happen the way it’s supposed to. Because sometimes the outcomes you
can’t change end up changing you and helping you grow to your full potential.
You cannot avoid risk without avoiding life.
When it’s
time to die, let us not discover that we have never lived. Living is a
risk. Happiness is a risk.
If you’re not a little scared sometimes, then you’re not doing it right.
Don’t worry about mistakes and failures, worry about what you’re giving up when
you don’t even try. Worry about the life you’re not living and the
happiness you’re forgoing, as you merely exist in the safety of your comfort
zone. Give yourself permission to be one of the people who survived doing
it wrong, who made mistakes, but recovered from them and grew into your truest
self.
Your biggest problems are often in your head.
The primary
cause of unhappiness and defeat is never the current situation but your
thoughts about it. Happiness and success really comes down to two
elements: the way you think and the way you act based upon your thoughts. Human
beings become really quite remarkable when they start thinking that they can do
great things, right now, without the need for anything more. When you
believe in yourself, you have realized the first secret of success. Often
finding your way is not about going somewhere new; it’s about seeing familiar
ground in new ways. Once you do, you will realize the only difference
between stumbling blocks and stepping stones is how you use them.
Long-term happiness cannot be bought; it must
be earned.
If you’d
rather live surrounded by pristine objects of little significance than by the
traces of happy, passionate memories, stay focused on acquiring tangible
possessions. Otherwise, stop fixating on things you can touch and start
caring about the things that touch you. Each of us has a unique fire in
our heart for something that makes us feel alive. It’s your duty to find
it and keep it lit. Whatever you do, don’t completely sacrifice your life for
your livelihood. Enjoy the gifts money can’t buy. Promise yourself
that you will stay true to your loves, your values, and your purpose. Let
your heart and mind work as one. Do what it takes so that one day, many
moons from now, you can look back at your life, take one final breath, and
crack an honest smile.
Not everyone will support you.
If you take
every insult or rude slur of your fellow human beings personally, you will be
offended for the rest of your life. One of the most freeing things we
learn in life is that we don’t have to agree with everyone, everyone doesn’t
have to agree with us, and that’s OK. As Bruce Lee once said, “I’m not in
this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live
up to mine.” Live by this quote. Don’t let the opinions of others
make you forget it. It takes a long time to learn
how to NOT judge yourself through someone else’s eyes, but once you do the
world is yours for the taking. We have all been placed on this earth to
discover our own life, and we will never be happy or successful if we try to
live someone else’s idea of it. So give up worrying too much about what
others think of you. Regardless of what they say about you and your
chosen path, remember that the only approval you need in the end is your own.
You are better off without some people you care
about.
It’s during
the toughest times of your life that you’ll get to see the true colors of the
people who say they care about you. Notice who sticks around and who
doesn’t, and be grateful to those who leave you, for they have given you the
room to grow in the space they abandoned, and the awareness to appreciate the
people who loved you when you didn’t feel lovable.
Bottom
line: Be okay with giving the gift of your absence to those who do not
appreciate and respect your presence.
You cannot have happiness without some sadness.
Chuck
Palahniuk once said, “The only way to find true happiness is to risk being
completely cut open.” Nothing could be closer to the truth. Some
sadness is necessary. Everything in life is two-sided. You can’t
expect to feel pleasure without ever feeling pain, joy without ever feeling
sorrow, confidence without ever feeling fearful, hope without ever feeling
uncertain, etc. There is no such thing as a one-sided coin in life, with
which you can buy a pain-free, trouble-free life. Life is a series of highs and
lows – an adventure that requires you to take chances and actions that have the
possibility of both success (happiness) and failure (sadness)
What’s done is done, but life goes on.
If you are
carrying strong emotions about something that happened in your past, they may
hinder your ability to live productively in the present. With everything
that has happened, you can either feel sorry for yourself or treat what has
happened as a gift of knowledge. Everything is either an opportunity to
learn and grow or an obstacle that keeps you stuck. You get to choose. Take
a deep breath. It’s going to be OK… maybe not today, but
eventually. There will be times when it seems like everything that could
possibly go wrong is going wrong. You might feel like you will be stuck
in this rut forever, but you won’t. Sure the sun stops shining sometimes,
and you may get a huge thunderstorm or two, but eventually the sun will come
out to shine. Sometimes it’s just a matter of us staying as positive as
possible in order to make it to see the sunshine break through the clouds again.