FAILURE COMES BEFORE SUCCESS
Many people become cynical and afraid of trying again because of past disappointments. These experiences have made them to wrongly believe that dreams don’t come to pass in the real world for everybody. Several persons, when they don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that they have tried. They hide failure, deny it, fear it, ignore it, and hate it. We must understand that failure is a necessary step to success. Even in the dictionary, failure comes before success. The greatest reward in becoming successful is not the success you achieve but the character and personality traits you acquire on the journey. Your character is who you are when nobody is watching, while personality is who you are before others. Your personality can open doors for you, but your character is what keeps the doors open.
We build character not in the classrooms of schools but amidst the circumstances of life; on the street as you tread the path of success. Character development is challenging because it involves continuity to behave proactively. At first, acting in the right manner seems challenging, but with practice, it becomes second nature to us. Sometimes we are put in the exact opposite circumstance of what we want so that we have a chance to develop our attitudes. We do not build our character in a day but out of the continuous practice of doing right: not giving up, even when we feel like it.
The man who has never made a mistake has never tried anything. All hugely successful people experienced failure at some point. Most of them began as failures. The music teacher of the great Polish pianist, Ignacio Paderewski, told him his hands were too small to master the keyboard during his initial lessons. When Enrico Caruso, the famous Italian tenor, first applied for instruction, the teacher told him, his voice was like the wind whistling through the window. The Members of Parliament silenced Benjamin Disraeli, the great statesman of Victorian England, the first time he spoke in the House of Commons. They laughed when he said, “Though I sit down now, there will come a time when you will stand to hear me.”
Henry Ford forgot to put a reverse gear in his first car. Thomas Edison spent two million dollars on an invention, which proved to be of little value. Even the brothers of Jesus, when He first started His ministry, did not believe in Him. Very little comes out right the first time we try things. Successful people see failure as an opportunity to begin again more intelligently. Many times in real life, it gets worse before it gets better. People that get stopped by failure are those not passionate about their dreams. Failure, repeated failures are the fingerprints on the road to achievement. Therefore, we must never allow our past failures to make us develop a negative attitude that says, “nothing ever works for me.” Negative people create an environment that makes it hard to stay positive. They are dream killers that need to be avoided by all; their attitudes can corrupt yours and throw you off track. We stop the corrupting influence of negative people by limiting our association with them.
Give them a wide berth to avoid contamination. These dream killers discourage others from dreaming because, for them, dreaming is just wishing. Wishing is fantasy, but dreaming is not. Fantasy is a dream without labor; it’s a vision without a mission. If you don’t work out your goals, then you are fantasizing and wasting time. It is labor that changes dreams to visible realities. Non-dreamers do not understand the process of turning dreams into reality; they see the result and call it luck. There are proven principles practiced by thousands that have enabled them to move from rags to riches, poverty to affluence, and frustration to realization. What others have learned, you can also learn.
