What does it take to be successful?
What is achievement?
We all desire to be great. We all desire great health, enviable body, riches, comfort, success, awesome friends and other excellent things in life.
However, mere mortals that we are, our desire alone is not sufficient to achieve anything, to bring us results.
However, desire is a key piece to the puzzle. The stronger the desire, likely that you’ll succeed, or achieve whatever that is you want to achieve.
Truly sparkling achievements and great successes are not rare by chance.
They are sparkling and great because they are rare. The rarity can be caused by two factors –
1. There is not enough information about this kind of success to take action that is bound to succeed – such as buying tickets of Sikkim lottery, or walking into a casino in Las Vegas. You just don’t know of anything you can do that will definitely win you a fortune in a casino. This is not everyone’s cup of tea, but in the world there is no scarcity of gamblers and casinos do well.
2. There would be pain along the way, which is why few people ever try it. People know what it takes to do well – but it’s too difficult to be relentlessly pursuing the goal, to painful to be disciplined, and the world is too distracting. People face pain, and they give up. I don’t know how to succeed in the first category of activities. If I do not know how to win a game, I do not enter it unless I am going in as a student. However, to want to learn it I need to first believe that there is a sure shot way of winning, even if the way is painful. I never gamble and I never buy lottery tickets because I believe that there is no specific way to guaranteed success.
That brings us to the second category. It’s easy to succeed here. Embrace pain – because only the pain separates the winners from the losers. Everyone would be a winner if there was no pain – so it’s an ally of the winners.
Going through the pain is what makes the winners special. If you are a winner, you got to love pain – except that you do not sit and suffer the pain. You make progress relentlessly; you march like an unstoppable terminator through every difficulty towards your goal. You always find shortcuts whenever you can, but you are not afraid of pain.
The pain never stops you dead on your track. If you are a winner, you must love pain. Pain is the gateway to any significant achievement.
