Show me the person who has never failed and you’ll be showing me a person who has never accomplished anything.
Failure is a natural part of life. We all have to go through it at one point or another. It can’t be helped.
You may not be able to change the fact that failures and setbacks will happen once in a while, but you can determine how you react to them. And it turns out that how you react to failure matters a lot.
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Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg both dropped out of Harvard. David Geffen went to college for only three semesters before leaving. Ralph Lauren, Ted Turner and Steve Jobs are others who dropped out before getting their bachelor’s degrees.
All are billionaires; all are college dropouts.
The actual list of billionaires has even more college dropouts. According to the Forbes 400 list of billionaires, 63 earned nothing past a high school diploma. And the bulk of these people earned their way onto the list rather than having inherited their wealth.
So what do these people do that allows them to build up such a vast empire with so little formal education? What kind of life lessons can we learn from their stories?
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A reporter once asked Muhammad Ali how many sit ups he could do. The great boxer said he didn’t know. He only started counting when it started hurting.
This is the story I like to think about when I think about reaching greatness. Muhammad Ali is generally considered one of the greatest boxers of all time. Just by looking at this quote I can see why.
What made Muhammad Ali great is this ability to push past his limits so he could grow and become better. That’s what it takes to reach greatness. It means ignoring what you think is impossible to be the best.
So what qualities do you need to bring out your own greatness?
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I know it’s a rather morbid idea, but every once in a while I like to imagine what the last day of my life will look like. It’s more a matter of intellectual curiosity than grim preoccupation.
I can actually trace back to the moment when I started doing this. It all started with a phone call I received a few years ago. A friend of mine called me up and said he had some bad news for me. It was more than bad news though; it was terrible news.
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It’s easy to look back on your past and see how big decisions have changed your life. What’s harder to do is look back and realize how all those small everyday decisions have impacted you.
Most people give a lot of thought to making big decisions, but how many of us give much thought to the small everyday ones? There’s a great quote by Wayne Dyer that goes, “Our lives are the sum total of the choices we have made.” So what kind of life are your everyday decisions making?
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Can you have courage without fear? By definition, courage is the ability to confront fear and uncertainty. You really can’t have one without the other.
Some of the best things you can do for yourself require courage. Fear is what holds you back. But the two are so interlinked that you can never quite separate them.
What you can do is understand fear and its nature. There are some underlying truths about fear. Once you understand them, they can help you build courage to do just about anything.
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In the roughly three years I’ve had this blog, I’ve published a few posts that some people have considered a little controversial. At least that’s the general consensus I got from the blast of negative comments I received.
A few of those times were completely unintentional, but admittedly some were deliberately provoking. And in those cases, I would often wait, knowing that someone out there would soon send me a nasty email or comment regarding what I had just said.
It might be weird to say, but it’s kind of a rush.
But it wasn’t always like that. In fact, the first negative comment I received really hurt. I put a lot of thought behind my arguments and people were happy trying to rip them to shreds. Yet through all the feedback, both good and bad, I learned a valuable lesson. You can’t always hold yourself back – you have to be willing to say controversial things.
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