Never Too Late To Start
I recently came across a series of infographics showing at what age some of the most successful and wealthy CEO’s gained their success, and what terrible ‘losers’ they were up to that point. From not having a college degree to working as a waitress until they were 35, from unemployed to hundreds of failed ideas before the big success, a common denominator emerged: Success is really difficult, and takes a lot longer to achieve than commonly understood!
One thing that always grabs my attention when I listen to people who have become successful is the fact that almost all of them went through a quite extensive season of hardship. Be it not having money, losing their job, or failing at everything they were trying, they all had to go through struggle before success was even tasted. They had to build resilience first. Everyone’s definition of success is different, and for me, it really is not about money. It’s about the ability to be able to live fully into who you were meant to be. And to do that, boy, do you need to be resilient in this world.
But what is resilience? Let’s look at what the dictionary says:
resilient |riˈzilyənt| adjective: 1. (of a substance or object) able to recoil or spring back into shape after bending, stretching, or being compressed. 2. (of a person or animal) able to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions: The fish are resilient to most infections.
When everything comes easily, there is no need for resilience, because in its essence, resilience means the ability to bounce back or recover quickly from difficult conditions. If everything goes right all the time, when is there need to learn how to bounce back and recover?
Here’s the thing – the world is an unfair place, nothing is perfect, and our ability to bounce back or recover is a survival skill every person needs to learn. It is vital that we are allowed to develop resilience and our expectation that everything should be perfect might be the very reason why we sometimes are so disappointed with life, people, and God.
Maybe its time we reframe our view on hardship, failures, mistakes, and disappointments. It is time to wear a new lens that shows you the opportunity in the hardship: The chance to grow resilient through this hardship. Perhaps this is exactly what you need to become fully alive.