There is a kind of a popular trend saying for you to win you should lose a lot of times, that all the fails somehow lead you to success. Really? Do you fail to win? I love paradoxes, really, I love them, but I don’t agree with this. It’s like saying if you are in a dark place, you should go against the walls until you find the exit. With luck, you can find the doors, hitting the walls over and over again. This is the plan? I don’t think it is a good plan, a very hurtful one to follow. it makes me remember a game I played when I was young, “Lemmings”, these little creatures, they moved to all kind of obstacles until someone (the player) could guide them to the exit door.
It is normal to “fail” a few times, but only if it is a part of a strategic plan, where the outcome of some tactics didn’t reward us as we though they could, but this is not failing, it is fighting against the uncertainty. Failing is bad, makes us wish to quit the endeavor. But having a mindset about victory and became very upset because something didn’t go as we wanted, makes us trying to improve our strategy, without losing our focus on the goal.
Maybe this is just about semantics, but makes all the difference by saying someone should lose to win, against the mindset that he just have to improve until he wins. In the first case we are saying you are a loser but maybe with luck you can get it, on the second, we are saying, you have the right to fight for what you want, but revise your strategy and the tactics as necessary while you are using them. You are making the person feel he/she is already there, but should adapt better to the environment to keep going.
The true of all of this, is that a lot of people will really fail, there are no space for all the people to be the owners of big companies, managers, leaders or references in their fields. In the end, only some of them will reach the success. Some people will say they are the ones who never quitted (“besides the falls along the way”), I will admit that some of the credit was due to the persistence (of falling and get up again), but the luck, time, the right people at the right time, context, environment, friends, family, money, they had a lot of saying in the final outcome.
I am not trying to steal your dreams, or steal the motivation that leads your life, but I think each people just have to try to find what their natural qualities are, where they can be great, and try, in that space, to fight to be great, not hitting walls until finding the success but enjoying the ride of overcoming the obstacles of improvement, again, not the walls, just obstacles, where your natural skills can help you to overcome them, and the victory is almost certain.
First, find yourself, then find your happiness.