If you possess a failure mentality toward success, the following facts will assist you in making meaningful changes that will positively improve your perspective regarding success and how to achieve it.
Those who win or excel in a race are those who truly think they can win even before the race commences.
No one can make you succeed if you think you cannot. No one can stop you from succeeding if you think you can. It does not matter what others think about you; all that matters is what you think of yourself. If you think you can, so it is; if you think you cannot, so it is. Your thought is your driving force and roadmap to your future and destiny. If you think you can succeed, you will certainly succeed; if you think you cannot succeed, it is also certain you will not. Henry Thoreau said, “Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our private opinion. What a man thinks of himself is what determines, or rather indicates, his fate.” It is what you picture in your mind that you will go to work to accomplish, and when you try and believe it is possible, there is nothing you set your mind to achieve that cannot be achieved.
Obstacles are like a mirage; you keep seeing them from afar, but they disappear when you approach them with a triumphant gesture.
There are obstacles in every dream or goal. There were obstacles in the path of Wilbur and Orville Wright (the Wright Brothers) when they wanted to invent the airplane. There were obstacles in the path of Thomas Edison when he wanted to invent the incandescent light bulb. Today, airplanes fly, light bulbs shine, and those obstacles are nowhere to be found. Oftentimes, the obstacles that stand in the way of our goals or destinies are those we have not yet confronted. The key to overcoming the obstacles you foresee is to start moving and keep moving with a winning and no-retreat attitude.
Of what value will success be to you if you have never experienced failure? In his book Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare said, “He jests at scars that never felt a wound.”
Success would not be a great and special achievement if it were easily achieved. The struggle involved before it is achieved makes it a great and special accomplishment. Whoever desires to succeed without facing challenges should bear in mind that he will never experience the true pleasure of success. If you have never experienced disappointment or failure—or if disappointment and failure are not possibilities in what you do—it is clear that succeeding in that thing means little. What we obtain too cheaply, we esteem too lightly. Maintain a positive attitude toward success even when you fail or when the going gets tough; consider it a price we all must pay before we can claim victory over failure and mediocrity. Norman Vincent Peale said, “A successful man will never see a day that does not bring a fresh quota of problems, and success is the ability to deal with them without giving up.”
Attempting something without hope for success is like expecting failure and working to achieve it.
Dr. Curt Richter, a psychologist, carried out an experiment to demonstrate how negative thinking affects effort. Dr. Richter used two rats in his experiment. He dropped Rat-1 into a tank of warm water and timed the reaction. Rat-1 paddled and swam around for sixty hours before it finally gave up and drowned. He then added step two with Rat-2. This time, he held the rat tightly in his hand for a few minutes until the rat stopped struggling, then dropped it into the water. After splashing around for a few minutes, Rat-2 passively sank to the bottom of the tank and died. Dr. Richter concluded that Rat-2 died within minutes not because it could not swim for sixty hours like Rat-1, but because the inability of Rat-2 to free itself when he held it before dropping it into the water had convinced it that its struggle was bound to fail. Whoever lacks hope for success lacks the strength to succeed.
