Nothing Succeeds Like Success.
Success is the favourable termination of an attempt the crowning attainment of well-directed effort. It is the opposite of failure and confers great honour on him who honourably wins it. Labour is necessary to the attainment of success and is the child of Ambition fostered by Hope. The animating Wray of Hope fill sluggish veins with warm enthusiasm and engender a purpose in life.
Success is a goal, attractive to ambitious men as loadstone to iron, shining forth as a golden shrine set in the future, illuminated and made resplendent in the brilliant light of Hope. Hope is a potent and important factor to the attainment of success.
Find a man without hope and you have found a man fit for the insane asylum or ready to commit suicide. Therefore keep your eye steadily on the shrine of your ambitions and cling to Hope. Work with a single purpose. It is the only way you can become an absolute master of the situation in any walk of life. If you are not a full master of the situation, hope will deceive you and your shrine will topple in the dust, a broken and worthless idol.
Success is not an accident. It is the result of our attitude and our attitude is a choice. Hence success is a matter of choice and not chance.
Most crackpots keep waiting for a jackpot. But can that bring success?
A priest was driving by and saw an exceptionally beautiful farm. He stopped his car to appreciate the bountiful crop. The farmer was riding on his tractor and saw the priest at the corner. He drove towards the Priest and when he got there the priest said, "God has blessed you with a beautiful farm. You should be grateful for it. The farmer replied, "Yes, God has blessed me with a beautiful farm and I am grateful for it, but you should have seen this farm when God had the whole farm to himself!"
How come one person moves forward with one success after another, and yet some are still getting ready?
How come one man goes through life crossing one hurdle after another, accomplishing his goals while another struggle and gets nowhere?
If the answer to these two questions can become part of the curriculum, it could revolutionize the educational system. The uncommon man seeks opportunity, whereas the common man seeks security. We need to keep our minds on what we want, not on what we don't want.
WHAT IS SUCCESS?
A lot of research has gone into the subject of success and failure. All that we need to do is learn our lessons from history. When we study the life histories of successful people, we find that they have certain qualities in common no matter which period of history they lived in. Success leaves clues and if we identify and adopt the qualities of successful people, we shall be successful. Similarly, there are characteristics common in all failures. If we avoid those characteristics, then we shall not be failures. Success is no mystery, but simply the result of consistently applying some basic principles. The reverse is just as true: Failure is simply a result of making a few mistakes repeatedly. All of this might sound too simplistic, but the fact is that most truths are very simple. I'm not saying they are easy, but they certainly are simple.
To laugh often and love much;
To win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children;
To earn the approval of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends ;
To appreciate beauty;
To find the best in others;
To give off one's self without the slightest thought of return;
To have accomplished a task, whether by a healthy child, a rescued soul, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition;
To have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation;
To know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived;
This is to have succeeded.
THE WINNING EDGE
In order to get the winning edge, we need to strive for excellence, not perfection. Striving for perfection is neurotic; striving for excellence is progress, because there is nothing that can't be done better or improved. All that we need is a little edge. The winning horse in the races wins 5-to-1 or 10-to-1. Do you think he is five or ten times faster than the other horses? Of course not. He may only be faster by a fraction, by a nose, but the rewards are five or ten times greater.
Is it fair? Who cares? It doesn't matter. Those are the rules of the game. That is the way the game is played. The same is true in our lives. Successful people are not ten times smarter than the people who fail. They may be better by a nose, but the rewards are ten times bigger. We don't need to improve 1,000% in any one area. All we need is to improve 1% in 1,000 different areas, which is a lot easier. That is the winning edge!
STRUGGLE
Trials in life can be tragedies or triumphs, depending on how we handle them. Triumphs don't come without effort.
A biology teacher was teaching his students how a caterpillar turns into a butterfly. He told the students that in the next couple of hours, the butterfly would struggle to come out of the cocoon. But no one should help the butterfly. Then he left.
The students were waiting and it happened. The butterfly struggled to get out of the cocoon, and one of the students took pity on it and decided to help the butterfly out of the cocoon against the advice of his teacher. He broke the cocoon to help the butterfly so it didn't have to struggle anymore. But shortly afterwards the butterfly died. When the teacher returned, he was told what happened. He explained to this student that by helping the butterfly, he had actually killed it because it is a law of nature that the struggle to come out of the cocoon actually helps develop and strengthen its wings. The boy had deprived the butterfly of its struggle and the butterfly died. Apply this same principle to our lives. Nothing worthwhile in life comes without a struggle. As parents, we tend to hurt the ones we love most because we don't allow them to struggle to gain strength.
OVERCOMING OBSTACLES
People who have overcome obstacles are more secure than those who have never faced them. We all have problems and we feel discouraged sometimes. Most people get disappointed, but winners don't get disheartened. The answer is perseverance.
An English proverb says, "A smooth sea never made a skilful mariner." Everything is difficult before it becomes easy. We cannot run away from our problems. Only losers quit and give up.
Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. -- Abigail Van Buren
HOW DO WE MEASURE SUCCESS?
True success is measured by the feeling of knowing you have done a job well and have achieved your objective.
Success is not measured by our position in life but by the obstacles, we overcame to get there.
Success in life is not determined by how we are doing compared with others, but by how we are doing compared with what we are capable of doing. Successful people compete against themselves. They better their own record and keep improving constantly.
Success is not measured by how high we go up in life but by how many times we bounce back when we fall down. It is this bounce-back ability that determines success.
EVERY SUCCESS STORY IS ALSO A STORY OF GREAT FAILURE
Failure is the highway to success. Tom Watson Sr. said, "If you want to succeed, double your failure rate."
If you study history, you will find that all stories of success are also stories of great failures. But people don't see the failures. They only see one side of the picture and they say that person got lucky: "He must have been at the right place at the right time."
Let me share someone's life history with you. This was a man who failed in business at the age of 21; was defeated in a legislative race at age 22; failed again in business at age 24; overcame the death of his sweetheart at age 26; had a nervous breakdown at age 27; lost a congressional race at age 34; lost a senatorial race at age 45; failed in an effort to become vice-president at age 47; lost a senatorial race at age 49, and was elected president of the United States at age 52.
This man was Abraham Lincoln.
Would you call him a failure? He could have quit. But to Lincoln, defeat was a detour and not a dead end.
In 1913, Lee De Forest, inventor of the triodes tube, was charged by the district attorney for using fraudulent means to mislead the public into buying stocks of his company by claiming that he could transmit the human voice across the Atlantic. He was publicly humiliated. Can you imagine where we would be without his invention?
A New York Times editorial on December 10, 1903, questioned the wisdom of the Wright Brothers who were trying to invent the machine, heavier than air, that would fly. One week later, at Kitty Hawk, the Wright Brothers took their famous flight.
Colonel Sanders, at age 65, with a beat-up car and a $100 check from Social Security, realized he had to do something. He remembered his mother's recipe and went out selling. How many doors did he have to knock on before he got his first order? It is estimated that he had knocked on more than a thousand doors before he got his first order. How many of us quit after three tries, ten tries, a hundred tries, and then we say we tried as hard as we could?
As a young cartoonist, Walt Disney faced many rejections from newspaper editors, who said he had no talent. One day a minister at a church hired him to draw some cartoons. Disney was working out of a small mouse infested shed near the church. After seeing a small mouse, he was inspired. That was the start of Mickey Mouse.
Successful people don't do great things, they only do small things in a great way. One day a partially deaf four-year-old kid came home with a note in his pocket from his teacher, "Your Tommy is too stupid to learn, get him out of the school." His mother read the note and answered, "My Tommy is not stupid to learn, I will teach him myself." And that Tommy grew up to be the great Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison had only three months of formal schooling and he was partially deaf.
THE GREATEST GIFT
Man, of all creatures, is physically the most ill-equipped in this world. He cannot fly like a bird, can be killed by a tiny insect, cannot outrun a leopard, cannot swim like an alligator, cannot climb the tree like a monkey, doesn't have the eye of an eagle, nor does he have the claws and teeth of a wild cat. Physically, man is helpless and defenceless.
But nature is reasonable and kind. Nature's greatest gift to man is the ability to think. He can create his own environment, whereas animals adapt to their environment. Sadly, very few people use the greatest gift the ability to think to its full potential.
Failures are of two kinds: those who did and never thought and those who thought and never did. Going through life without using our ability to think is like shooting without aiming.
Life is like a cafeteria. You take' your tray, select your food and pay at the other end. You can get anything you want as long as you are willing to pay the price. In a cafeteria, if you wait for people to serve you, you will wait forever. Life is like that too. You make choices and pay the price.
Playing to Win Requires Commitment
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