I really like reading autobiographies and biographies of successful people.
I can’t remember what book it was in, but one successful person talked about how lucky they were to grow up in a hardship situation.
Fortunate to grow up living a hard life?
That really stuck me at the time and it still does today.
Don’t most people want to grow up in comfortable situations with lots of love and compassion?
That would be what most people want, but the truth is that for the most part we all have hardships in life and harsh life lessons. It seems, however, that successful people are able to look at their hardships are positives in their lives.
We All Make Wrong Decisions
Think back to when you made a choice and it really turned into something bad.
I can think back to more than a few in my life.
When you make those decisions and suffer the consequence you have opportunities to learn lessons. Maybe it’s spending too much money on credit when you’re in your twenties. Maybe it’s treating someone that you love like you don’t care and they move on.
Those are some harsh lessons and there are many more.
You can choose to kind of wallow in the harsh feelings that you’ll experience. That’s normal. Maybe you’ll try to block the pain with some kind of substance, but it will always come back once the effect wears off.
Or you could look for the lessons in the hardships.
It’s weird, but sometimes we need to really get hit over the head, so to speak, in order to learn a lesson about how life works. And when we do get hit in the head it can make us better as we move into the future.
We All Have Hardships, But Have A Choice Of How To Deal
My mom was a first grade teacher for decades. She saw all kinds of children come through her classroom from all different types of backgrounds. She always believed that just because a child came from a good background or a bad background didn’t mean that they would turn out to have a good life or a bad life.
Some children would come from difficult homes and they would turn out to be great, successful people. Sometimes that difficulty in life would give them an incredible drive for success.
Other kids would come from great backgrounds and make their own lives difficult. And of course sometimes you’d have kids from difficult backgrounds that would make poor choices and kids from good backgrounds that would make good decisions.
The point is that where we come from doesn’t have as much to do with where we go as we might think. And if we’re going through hardships at any point in life it doesn’t mean that they need to continue.
Successful people are able to use hardships to their advantage. They look for the motivation in those hardships and look to make the best of it. No, they don’t just make the best of it, but they look for ways to use those hardships to their advantage.
We all have hardships, but we don’t all have the same hardships. Recognize where yours are and from that you can use it as motivation to learn harsh lessons and to find opportunity to realize the lesson and how you can make better decisions going forward.
Final Thought
One of the harsh lessons I’ve learned in life is that the best things often take years to achieve. When we see the success that others have or the good things that others have we usually don’t see the years that went into getting those things.
We see someone with a successful business now, but we don’t see the ten years they put in to build that business to where it is today. We see someone with a successful business blog, but we don’t see the years that went into building that blog.
There are hundreds of examples.
Recognize that you’ve made and will make some poor choices in life. You’ll learn some harsh lessons. The key is to recognize the wrong and see that you can do the opposite and get positives out of life. It just takes that realization and a little patience and you’ll start seeing some positives really come out of your life.