Again – it’s the principal word in the vocabulary of anyone who has ever succeeded at anything. Those who have been successful will tell you that their success was built upon obstinacy – they failed again and again, and they kept plugging at it until finally succeeding. Success requires a certain kind of obsession. Not a certain kind of obsession, actually. It requires an obsessive obsession, period. It requires you to be headstrong and stubborn and, in many ways, being a royal pain in the ass for many if not everyone around you.
This is particularly relevant for me because I’ve been dealing with precisely this issue lately. Failing, again and again, and having to redouble my efforts, again and again. And at times it has been immensely frustrating, and I have had to butt heads with those around me, from my boss to my wife, leading me to be this close (thumb and forefinger a millimeter apart) to getting fired and getting divorced. I must admit: I don’t handle frustration well. Often times, my attitude has been to just say “screw it” and just go on my way and take up, I don’t know, gardening or something.
But here’s the thing: anything worth doing is rarely easy. We are bombarded by media messages that encourage us to take the path of least resistance, that we shall achieve happiness by the mere act and fact of breathing, leading to entire societies of very frustrated individuals because what marketing promises is NEVER what real life delivers. So we feel gypped, and sometimes take it out on others because those who push us to excel are the ones who we think are defrauding us, the ones who stand between us and the allegedly easy happiness waiting for us on the other side. But it is to those who challenge us the most that we should be most thankful. As Nietzsche wrote, in a friend one should have one’s best enemy.
Tune in for the next and final installment where we’ll see that the path of MOST resistance is the one that most often leads to extraordinary results.
humans tWisting 