“Success happens not by chance, but because you were given a chance and took advantage of it”-Kevin Geary

To most people, being born in a free country is the greatest gift. To others, it’s a fleeting thought. For the latter, I feel sorry.

Before I go any further, I must admit that not everyone will find success. There will always be those who sit around waiting for success to find them. There will be those who are simply not willing to achieve it. And there’s the fact that success would not exist without failure. All of these things create what we know; a world where success and failure are experienced by different groups of people.

Everyone in a free country has the opportunity to succeed. So why doesn’t everyone succeed? Because success and failure are choices made consciously and subconsciously and failure is chosen by many for various reasons.

Here are 7 undeniable reasons why some people fail where others succeed:

1. They define success wrong
” Striving for success without hard work is like trying to harvest where you haven’t planted”- David Bly

Do you believe that success is won, innate or earned? The answer someone gives can tell you a lot about them, and why they are where they are.

Success is won: if you believe that success is won, you experience animosity and envy towards those who you view as lucky or more fortunate than you. You also believe that success is out of your control; it simply depends on a flip of the coin or certain circumstances.

How hard are you willing to work if you believe that success is won rather than earned?

Success is innate: people who believe that success is innate often feel the same as those who believe it’s won. The only difference is that believers in innate success have a more pessimistic view of opportunity; it’s trivial to them. Why does opportunity matter if success is innate?

How hard are you willing to work if you feel your opportunity doesn’t matter and your chances of success are nil because of your circumstances?

Success is earned: the last group of people believe what we know to be true based on statistical analysis; success is earned. These people understand that in order to succeed, they must earn it. How do they earn it? They climb the mountain and utilize the same process others have used to achieve.

How hard are you willing to work if you believe success must be earned?

2. They define opportunity wrong

“The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity” Ayn Rand

Do you believe that opportunity provides a possibility of success, a probability of success, or that it’s trivial?

Let’s ask the same questions we asked when we discussed success:

How hard are you willing to work if you believe the opportunity you were born with is trivial?

How hard are you willing to work if you believe the opportunity you were born with is a possibility?

How hard are you willing to work if you believe the opportunity you were born with is probability?

I hope this is coming together for you. I want you to see exactly how your views on opportunity and success work together to help determine your outcome.

People who believe success is won see their opportunity as a possibility but sometimes as trivial.
People who believe success is innate see their opportunity as trivial.
People who believe success is earned see their opportunity as a probability, but sometimes only as a possibility.

I’m layman’s terms the rich see success as earned and view their opportunity as probability.
The middle class see success as earned as view their opportunity as possibility, but sometimes as probability.
The poor class sees success as won or innate and views theirs opportunity as trivial or in some cases as a possibility but not a probability.

Of course people don’t stay in one class their entire life. The people who move between classes tend to have the same outlook as those of the class they move to.

3. They define work wrong

“The value of a man’s position is often determined by the number of people qualified to fill it” -Kevin Geary

We just discussed two important terms: success and opportunity. In order to continue our discussion further, we must discuss another “work”

“But success doesn’t always come from hard work!”

Inevitably people will point out that factory employees work harder than CEO’s. Of course, this depends on your analysis of the word “work”

Choose a corresponding term:

Physical labor
Mental labor
Labor

Those who claim that success doesn’t always come from hard work only acknowledge one aspect of work, physical labor.

Of course, work is labor, period. Excluding mental labor from the term work is biased and unfair. CEO’s may sit at a desk, wear a suit, and enjoy the air conditioning, but that doesn’t mean they labor any less than the man in the shop room, it’s simply a different type of labor. Not accepting this is like making the argument that one who hates their job labors more than one who enjoys their job and the pay should be altered to make up for it. You see where this is going?

In terms of pay scale, people who run companies are worth a lot more than those who assemble products. Why? Because it’s easy to find people who can assemble products and it’s not very easy to find people who can operate multi-million dollar companies for a profit.

Needless to say, the man in the shop room wouldn’t have a job if the CEO behind the desk wasn’t doing his (and vice versa). The only difference is which job you’d rather be doing, and that depends solely on the choices you make throughout your life.

How do you think the CEO VIEWS Success and opportunity? How do you think the shop worker views those same terms?

4. They defeat themselves

” To expect defeat is nine-tenths of defeat itself” – Henry Mencken

While there is a minority of people who actually choose to fail, the majority that fail simply make poor choices or have a poor outlook. Basically for the majority, failure is a choice but not a decision.

I can’t possibly list all of the bad choices people make which lead them to failure, but a few to get you headed in the right direction are:

Abusing drugs or alcohol/addiction
Not getting an education
Having a poor work ethic
Having a child too young or out of wedlock
Immaturity/laziness
Borrowing too much money

And the list goes on, and on, and on….and on.

Of course, there are also those things which are out of someone’s control.

If you’re born into an inner-city family and attend a poor school system, you obviously start out behind others. If you’re handicapped, your road to success may be longer and more difficult. But none of this bars you from success.

Lastly as our quote at the top reminds us, many people defeat themselves simply by expecting defeat in the first place. They don’t expect success and it actually becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

5. They think failure is final

” Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm”- Winston Churchill

” But hard work doesn’t always equal success. Some people work really hard, but fail. They tried and didn’t succeed”.

Failure is a key ingredient in success. Those who don’t achieve success most likely quit after their failure. Quitting of course is a choice.

If you were to follow in the footsteps of a successful person, you would likely pass the remnants of multiple failures. If you followed in the footsteps of a failure, you would find their lifeless future at the feet of their first opponent.

So the question is, how hard and how long are you willing to fight? There are no shortcuts, statistically. The vast majority of millionaires are self-made and far too many lottery winners are broke and worse off than they were before they won the lottery. Why? Because wealth is about behavior and money doesn’t protect you from failure.

If you want to succeed where other people fail, you have to step right over failure and keep walking. The people who don’t make it let failure defeat them. Failure becomes their end result because they refuse to walk any further.

Look at it this way, if you aren’t dead yet, there’s still hope.

6. They’re a victim of their circumstances.

” The first step towards success is taken when you refuse to be a captive of the environment in which you find yourself”
-Mark Cain

One of the biggest rebuttals given by non-achievers is that they are held back by their circumstances.

I don’t think circumstance is a fair argument though. Yes, you may be subject to circumstances that make it more difficult for you to succeed. , but that doesn’t change the fact that you start with the same opportunity as others; the opportunity provided to you by living in a free country.

It’s also important to note that some handle circumstances better than others. For instance, you can’t say that being a handicap is a circumstance that prevents you from achieving when others with the same handicap have achieved.

Everyone has issues, circumstances, road blocks etc. it’s all about how you deal with your circumstances and how hard you’re willing to work to overcome them. But the basics don’t change; you’re still In a free country and nobody is preventing you from achieving except for yourself.

Circumstance is also unimportant because it doesn’t undermine finality. For example, a trust fund baby can lose his fortune with a series of bad decisions just as easily as a child from the ghetto can acquire a fortune with a series of good decisions.

Don’t be quick to judge others base on their circumstances. Instead judge them on their ferocity in overcoming those circumstances.

7. They take No for an answer

” Opposition is a natural part of life. Just as we develop our physical muscles through overcoming opposition -such as lifting weights-we develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and adversity”-Stephen R Covey

First, you are given an opportunity. Then, based on that opportunity, you hatch a dream. And when you try to execute that dream, you meet your opposition. It is here on the battleground, facing that opposition, that success is either realized or lost.

Everyone faces opposition on their way to the top. The crack babies and the trust fund babies both have their own set of problems. And you can’t assume that one faces more opposition than the other; everyone’s life and path to success is unique.

The one thing they do have in common is the opportunity for success. But, as you try to succeed, there will be people and circumstances around every corner that try to tell you NO! The disability you were born with tells you NO, your abusive parents tell you NO, you pessimistic friends tell you NO, your lack of self esteem causes you to say NO to yourself, addiction tells you NO and so on.

The people who succeed are those who don’t Take NO for an answer. They shrug off the pessimism, they choose better friends, they put up boundaries with their family and they surround themselves with positive people and things.

Conclusion

Success is possible for anyone who is willing to achieve it. There are many who want success, but there is a huge difference between wanting and willing -to. You have to be willing ….

The other thing to remember is your outlook and the way you define success, opportunity and work play a large role in determining your outcome.

If you aren’t achieving, the first person you should always look to is yourself.

By Kevin Geary

If you Are willing to succeed click here

People who would rather die than not succeed tend to succeed.

It seems that failure tends to be more public than success. Or at least that’s what we perceive it to be. We fret it, we try to avoid it, and we question ourselves every time we have unconventional ideas. But the simple truth is – no great success was ever achieved without failure. It may be one epic failure. Or a series of failures – such as Edison's 10,000 attempts to create a light bulb or Dyson’s 5,126 attempts to invent a bagless vacuum cleaner. But, whether we like it or not, failure is a necessary stepping stone to achieving our dreams. Several months ago I gave a short, TED-style talk on the topic. And today I wanted to share this collection of 30 quotes that will hopefully inspire you to look at failure differently. 1. “Failure isn’t fatal, but failure to change might be” – John Wooden 2. “Everything you want is on the other side of fear.”  - Jack Canfield 3. “Success is most often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.” - Coco Chanel 4. “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” - Robert F. Kennedy 5. “The phoenix must burn to emerge.” - Janet Fitch 6. “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” - Ken Robinson 7. “Giving up is the only sure way to fail.” - Gena Showalter 8. “If you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail… it takes back bone to lead the life you want” - Richard Yates 9. “Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.” - Denis Waitley 10. “When you take risks you learn that there will be times when you succeed and there will be times when you fail, and both are equally important.” - Ellen DeGeneres 11. “It’s failure that gives you the proper perspective on success.” - Ellen DeGeneres 12. “There is no failure except in no longer trying.” - Chris Bradford 13. “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” - Thomas A. Edison 14. “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” - Winston Churchill 15. “There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.” - Paulo Coelho 16. “Pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.” - Lance Armstrong 17. “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” - Winston Churchill 18. “I’d rather be partly great than entirely useless.” - Neal Shusterman 19. “We are all failures – at least the best of us are.” - J.M. Barrie 20. “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.” - Henry Ford 21. “Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.” - C.S. Lewis 22. “Winners are not afraid of losing. But losers are. Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success.” - Robert T. Kiyosaki 23. “Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.” - Napoleon Hill 24. “You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.” - Johnny Cash 25. “It’s not how far you fall, but how high you bounce that counts.” - Zig Ziglar 26. “Failure is so important. We speak about success all the time. It is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success. I’ve met people who don’t want to try for fear of failing.” - J.K. Rowling 27. “No human ever became interesting by not failing. The more you fail and recover and improve, the better you are as a person. Ever meet someone who’s always had everything work out for them with zero struggle? They usually have the depth of a puddle. Or they don’t exist.” - Chris Hardwick 28. “When we give ourselves permission to fail, we, at the same time, give ourselves permission to excel.” - Eloise Ristad 29. “With a hint of good judgment, to fear nothing, not failure or suffering or even death, indicates that you value life the most. You live to the extreme; you push limits; you spend your time building legacies. Those do not die.” - Criss Jami 30. “What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?” – John Green

Source: By Ekaterina Walter

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