Success isn’t owned; it’s rented and the rent is due every single day

Pick up any well-known entrepreneur, author, inventor or any person from any profession who has gained global recognition, and now look for qualities that had made them a part of this article today. All these people will have a few things in common, the ability to endure tough situations, to hold on to their ideas and vision even after innumerable failures, and putting in the effort without seeing immediate results.

The most clichéd phrase “never give up” has two sides to it. One is to keep trying again and again, despite innumerable failures. The other is to continue pushing our standards and reinvent new ones.

Stephen king, one of the greatest writers of all time, also described as the “king of horror”, received 60 rejections before selling his first short story, for $35. Colonel Sanders had been rejected by more than 1,009 people before he started his franchise – model restaurant Kentucky Fried Chicken, which is present at over 22,600 locations globally, today.

The good news is resilience can be learned – developing thoughts, behaviors, and actions that allow you to recover from traumatic events in life. Building resilience can help you cope adaptively and bounce back after changes, challenges, and failures.

Having high resilience is a pre-requisite for a long journey. But just going on and on without making any real progress, would be just like an athlete who runs fast in a marathon, depleting all his energy before he reaches the final legs of the race.The athlete needs to realize that he could complete the race faster, but not by simply running faster, if he knew how to reinvent his energy flow so that he could use his energy more efficiently and also save some for the last mile.

We need to understand that as time changes, the definition of success changes as well. And hence, don’t resist the fact that your past idea could be deemed obsolete, overnight. Be ready to look at the present world and understand the difficulties and needs of it. The present world is what you live in today and hence living with ideas of past success doesn’t help. We are better off trying to do stuff that helps the world currently, rather than holding onto something that had worked previously.

A good example:

It doesn’t make sense to spend a long time on developing an SMS app that looks and works better because nobody cares. Today, internet had become so affordable that everyone had already switched to messenger apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. These new apps have become so common that we hardly give their influence on us a second thought.

Be a tree that bends with the wind, not the one that’s hard and rigid.