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Let’s face it. If you're not achieving the kind of results you had hoped to get with your life, maybe the reason doesn't lie with other people. Put simply, you cannot blame other people for your lack of success. Maybe it's not a situation out of your control. Maybe it's not the fact that you weren't born with advantages, maybe it has nothing to do with with any of the common reasons you give yourself. Instead, it may have everything to do with the excuses you choose to believe in.
You have to understand that you are always in control of your life. The only person who is truly responsible for your life is yourself. Stop giving yourself any of the common excuses below. If you want to live a more consequential and yes, effective life.
People who think this way believe that the world, and all the goodness in it, is like a giant pie. For a person's slice to get bigger, somebody's slice has to necessarily get smaller. You have to remember that if you want to achieve the best, ‘the best’ is largely defined by you. The outcome that you get out of any effort is ultimately going to be judged by you.
When you say that the best is already taken by others you're just giving yourself an excuse not to try.
You are assuming that there's only a fixed amount of "the best things in life." That's not true.
You may come in third place and still think you did your best. That is good enough.
Stop robbing yourself of opportunities for victory by refusing to even try. Ultimately, whether you came in first place or not, what matters most, at the end of the day, all boils down to whether you selected a vision for yourself and did everything you could to achieve that vision.
That's going to be the measure that you're going to have to live with. That's how you determine ‘the best.’ Sadly, thinking that ‘the best’ has already been taken is just an excuse to not even try.
When you constantly compare yourself to other people, don't be surprised if you come out looking like a loser most of the time. This happens quite a bit. Why? You compare all the best things they have going for themselves with the worst things in your life.
Otherwise, you wouldn't be comparing.
If you feel that you're in any way lacking or inadequate in a certain part of your life, you wouldn't be comparing that part of yourself with other people. There would not be any need to.
This is why it's a bad idea to think of ultimate outcomes in terms of comparison. Instead, you should run a race with yourself. You should ask yourself, "Did I try hard enough? Did I believe in something badly enough to get off my ass and make something out of myself?”
Those are the things that you should be asking instead of constantly comparing yourself to others. If you keep comparing yourself to others, then most things that you do wouldn't matter because you always come out on the losing end.
Part of what makes life fun and exciting is the fact that there are no guaranteed outcomes. There is no assurance of victory. If everything was guaranteed and success was dished out on a silver tray to anybody who showed up, there would be no point to life. There wouldn't be life at all as we currently define it.
What gives life value, excitement, and beauty is the fact that there is nothing you can take for granted.
Everything is up in the air. Everything is up for negotiation and everything can unfold at any time.
That's why when you think that you should be guaranteed success for you to try, you're just fooling yourself.
It doesn’t make any logical sense: if life success can be guaranteed, then it wouldn't matter whether you tried or not. It will be delivered to you anyway. You see how this ‘logic’ works? Stop giving yourself this excuse for failure and mediocrity.
Your past does not define you. Just because you've failed 100 times before doesn't necessarily mean that you are doomed to fail today. You have to understand that there are a lot of very successful people who have failed many times before they made it big.
Andy Grove, the genius behind Intel semiconductor chips, started a lot of businesses and ultimately all went belly up. But ultimately, he came up with Intel and the rest, as they say, is history. Similarly, ‘Colonel’ Harlan Sanders of KFC fame failed with almost all the projects he tried in life. Later in life he started a chicken restaurant and once again, like they say, the rest is history.
Just because you have experienced disappointment and setbacks in the past doesn't mean that they have to define you. The only way to lose is to quit. If you keep trying to keep springing back up and you give it your best, you are still in the game. You can still turn things around and achieve your dreams.
A lot of people are under the impression that they have to cheat for them to become rich. Many of them believe the poisonous idea that they have to somehow become perverted or degraded for them to achieve victory in their lives. These people have a very dismal view of victory. They think that becoming rich, powerful, and respected, all involve dirty tricks.
A lot of these people are under the impression that there's only so much wealth in the world and all of this is basically inherited or pass from one generation to the other. If you were to disturb this process or come up with something new, it's because you somehow someway cheated. Well, not so fast.
When you look at most of today's billionaires, the vast majority of them are self-made. Most of them came up with companies that produce solutions that didn't exist before. They earned their money. To think that you will somehow have to become somebody worse so you can become successful is really giving the whole idea of success a black eye. Because if you think that way then you automatically cast a negative light on everybody else was able to achieve natural success.
I'm talking about people who didn't cheat their way to the top. They didn't hurt other people to get what they wanted. Please understand that you can remain true to yourself even if you achieve success. In fact, if you develop integrity and make it your life’s focus, this makes success all the more probable.