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We all strive for success, whether that means landing a role on your favorite TV show, becoming the first woman in your family to get a Ph.D. or even learning a new language.
While it is encouraging to think about reaching your goals, most people don’t want to hear about or experience the pain it takes to become successful. Nobody is born successful – not even J.K. Rowling, Oprah or Beyoncé. Each of these women had to work hard for what they have now. You will too. Working hard and experiencing pain is necessary to grow, achieve and thrive.
As psychologist and author Sherrie Campbell writes on Entrepreneur, “Every successful person travels a painful journey.” Suffering is an integral part of attaining success. Trying to grow and develop your skills without any sort of failure is like trying to cook without using any heat. You can have all the ingredients you need, but without any heat, you can’t make a meal.
How do you think you will be able to handle newfound success if your character and personality are not shaped and sharpened by trials? When you are successful – say you are the CEO of a company – you are going to have to know how to handle the pressure, stress and workload. Imagine how hard it would be to juggle all those tasks without first getting acclimated to stress, to the environment, to multitasking or to the company.
Scientific American explains that although positive thoughts and emotions can benefit mental health, having a relative absence of negative emotion “is not congruent with the messiness of life.” When people do not experience some form of failure along the way, their outlooks can become “so rosy that they ignore dangers or become complacent.”
Imagine how dangerous it would be to always look on the positive side of things without acknowledging the negative. Because life throws both the positive and the negative at you, it’s important to learn how to cope with both of them. Thus, Scientific American suggests you learn to accept how you are feeling. If you acknowledge that you are feeling disheartened at recent failures, that only lets you know you still value the end goal.
While the pain of success is undoubtedly important along your journey, it can also be very slow-paced. While the movies depict characters making a difference over a few key scenes and a montage of their hard work, life is much slower in reality. It is about living day by day, week by week, month by month.
Because moving day by day can be especially challenging, Entrepreneur warns that you might want to give up prematurely. An eternity seems to pass while you’re honing your talents and skills. You experience fits of self-doubt and periods of low self-esteem when you’re not quite sure what you’re doing. But as Entrepreneur writes, “It is during these times you must hold tight to your vision and take back control your motivation … The quickest way to derail your dreams is to quit when things look bleak.”
So instead calling it quits after the first – or even the 50th – failure, remind yourself that it is absolutely okay to feel pain and discouragement. It is not, however, okay to quit.
Any successful woman can tell you her journey was not an easy one. For example, if you asked J.K. Rowling, she would tell you that her $21 billion dollar Harry Potter franchise started with a series of rejections and disappointment. In fact, J.K. Rowling has even said, “By every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.” But even when she was jobless, divorced and struggling, she didn’t stop writing.
In your mind, success should become synonymous with challenges, heartaches, self-doubt, uncertainty and faith. They aren’t easy for anyone to deal with, but they are necessary evils. Without them, the end result would not nearly be as sweet.
