THE STAIRS OF FAILURE AND SACRIFICE TO SUCCESS
Wilma Rudolph once said, “never underestimate the power of dreams and the influence of the human spirit. We are all the same in this notion: the potential for greatness lives within each of us”. Indeed, the prospect for eminence is in every one of us.
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We all love to see our names on something we built or finished; the accolades and the feeling of accomplishment and, again, “greatness” that comes with this is immeasurable, but the complication here is the difficulty to obtain that greatness we all so desperately need.
In recent times, it has become my charge to find out why establishments and individuals experience serious arduousness before attaining distinction. It has always been another part of our lives, and sadly it is going nowhere. Numerous stories connect to this topic. Some of them tell the ups and downs in their journey to success, others that never even got through half of the struggle but gave up along the line and the ones that strived all through, still pushing but have not gotten there yet. Oh, let us not forget those who also arrived at their thriving destination and lost everything they built due to mismanagement and carelessness.
Let’s take the founder of Zoom, Eric Yuan, as an example. He wanted to make a name for himself so badly. In the mid-’90s, he applied for a US visa eight times and was refused admittance each time. That would have broken most of us because how do you keep giving your energy to something that does not yield positive results? But Eric still kept trying, with so much fortitude and determination. Finally, he applied again for the ninth time and bingo! It was validated. Then again, the entire process took him another two years. Lord knows it will take the highest self-restraint to hold on as Eric did.
However, it all comes down to how badly you want to succeed. I am sure Eric had friends and relatives who tried talking him out of that decision after the fourth try, maybe, and gave up on him when they realized he was adamant, even calling him names and mocking him. Eric finally left China and was employed by a Silicon Valley Communication company. By 2012, he could put together everything he had learned from the company and on his own, and he launched Zoom, which is currently being used by over 700,000 companies and individuals worldwide. This bluntly tells us that giving up will never be an option, even if we must wait ten years to succeed.
Another quote that keeps reverberating in my head is from Dr. Stephen Covey: “Private victories precede public victories. You cannot invert that process any more than you can harvest a crop before you plant it”. This quote speaks to me differently. Strikingly, it informs me that there is a form of creed that dominates genuine accomplishments in any form or shape. Going behind that particular law to succeed is almost, if not impossible. We must understand that life and all its baggage constitute steps given to each of us as instruments of success in an orderly way.
Progression needs a more substantial effort than our previous step. As we grow in ideas and improve our thinking, we will need to tiringly work twice as much as we worked in the first round. As we climb higher, it becomes scarier, more complicated and time-consuming. That is when the urge to drop everything and quit sets in. A tiny voice always tries to dampen our spirit or speak to us to keep pressing. Mahatma Gandhi once said, “The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within”. Believe it or not, that voice can make or unmake you, and it is up to you to make that tyrant rule you positively.
This joy arises when we feel we are attaining our aspirations or soaring higher. This is because we know what we have gone through, the struggle, the turn downs, the negativity from the people we least expected and the turmoil just so we can succeed; it gives us this sudden rush of confidence and accomplishment, especially when you did it all by yourself from start to finish. All this helps us gain maturity and sophistication and prepares us for whatever struggle we will face next.
However, sometimes we also do not go according to the stairs of success. Let’s say the stairs count from one to seven. You have been able to climb to stair three, and suddenly, for no apparent reason, you find yourself on stair six. You can see that the joy of ascendancy and victory, coupled with all the stress you went through to get there, is much greater.
There are also times we do not want to relive, times when we fall from stair four to stair one. So we descend instead of ascending. An example is Eike Batista da Silva, a Brazilian business tycoon who was one of the ten most affluent people in the world with riches that exceeded $30 billion. Almost all that money came from his chain of businesses and his equity holdings in a publicly traded conglomerate, EBX group and related holdings in the oil, gas, logistics and mining sectors.
The media named him “King Midas” due to his fast-rising billionaire status. But his companies suddenly began to go under a lot of scrutiny. They had widely overemphasized the oil and gas supplies they received, and operating and dividend targets could not be found. Eventually, Batista lost his integrity, and the stock prices of his companies took a nosedive down to over 99%—his energy company OGX, which was like his topmost pride and treasure, filed for bankruptcy recently. So, Eike made over $30 billion in a blink and lost over $30 billion with just a snap of the finger.
Nobody can imagine how he must have felt, but I guess we all have, one way or the other, lost something we built with our hands and watched it all crumble to the ground with nothing to do to stop it. What I find fascinating about this is that the people who first went down or descended, then finally succeeded, are more grateful and proficient because they remember vividly what they had to face to succeed. Now Eike Batista is doing some projects, including a gas pipeline connecting Brazil to Paraguay, geothermal power and nano-technologies, and a new batch of gold mines. Napoleon Hill practically meant it when he said, “Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle”.
I strongly believe in antagonism being a big part of our progress. Without people opposing our ideas, without negativity, without experiencing as low as stair number one before finally moving to stair number seven, we would not understand and encounter the distinction between ascending and descending in success. The law that controls human development is not partial. It definitely would not grant success to persons who did not counterbalance in the early stages of their hustle first. I do not know who needs to hear this, but constitutionally, there is never a cutoff to success.
Deep down, somehow, we know this. As we climb higher on the stairs of success, we need these adventures, and that is explicitly why most affluent people always have a back story to share. These stories motivate us as we try to move up the stairs of success, whether big or small. In light of this, I remembered a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr that entirely resonates with this; “human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Every step toward the goal requires sacrifice, suffering and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals”.
Every day of our lives, we pick and choose. We do not expect another person to make choices for us. We should know that these choices control the pace at which our success story goes, whether fast, slow, left, right, up or down. Again, the law that controls success depends solely on the individual or the organization, and it is necessary to encounter some difficulty before we ascend and taste victory. It would help if you had fortitude and tolerance, which are pre-eminent.
Enough experience and standpoint coupled with serious perseverance is the magic potion that fuels the excitement, conviction and inspiration we all need to aid us in climbing the stairs of success, in our endeavours, in organizations, or anywhere we find ourselves.
Contributor: Maame Efua Aikins
