In our everyday life, almost everyone desires to achieve success, regardless of how relative it is. Yet, only a few of us are able to achieve.
In the preliminary stage of the journey to success, people are always enthusiastic and have no doubt in their minds that they will achieve it.
However, Science has made it clear that 92% of people don’t achieve their goals. In fact, a study of 900 million activities predicts that most new year’s resolutions will be abandoned in mid-January.
Now, what does giving-up means?
Giving up is when one cease making effort towards a set goal, admit defeat and allow oneself to be taken over by an emotion or addiction.
So the million dollar question is, WHY DO PEOPLE GIVE UP?
Well, here are five main reasons why people give up, and I call it ‘THE FIVE PREVENTIVE CHAOS OF SUCCESS ‘
The first preventive chaos of success is the lack of having a deep meaningful purpose and a dream.
Having a deep meaningful purpose means you have such a great vision and a strong “why” you exist on the earth in the first place which you can literally die for. The very discovery of this is what will drive you and fuel you to act in spite of fear to achieve success.
The richest man on earth today, “Elon Musk” made it clear in an interview that, if something is important enough, you do it even when all odds are against you.
This pursuit is what I call having a great vision and a strong ‘why’.
When you believe in something and you stand for it, no matter how tremulous it appears to be, you fight hard enough to achieve it.
What made Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a legendary leader is that, he had a deep meaningful purpose and a DREAM!!!!!!
The top 1% of the most successful people on the planet are as a result of fighting for their dreams, purpose and their just course. It might take years, but it is possible.
The main key here is that, the lack of deep meaningful purpose and a dream will make one give up. When you have a dream, you automatically master and develop all the principles there is to achieve it.
Secondly, the absence of FAITH in oneself makes us give up.
Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen — according to scriptures.
Faith, in the words of the great Nelson Mandela, “ is the ability to see the invisible and believe in the impossible “.
My year’s of studies, research and experience in human relations have proved that, irascible people tend to feed on others’ peccadillos, forgetting that they are also liable to perfidious actions as part of the human nature.
These very same people, deep down within are spiteful and contumacious to a certain degree which make them abstruse because they try to conceal that part of them. Often, they live in seclusion and repudiate to socialize in lieu of the fact when they get toppled over a bit, their emotions get in their way and halt their entire thinking process and engulf their life.
This picture of such individuals life is the main reason why you cannot trust absolutely in the MIRROR. Why? This is because the image you see when you stand in front of the mirror is not your perfect and true reflection.
The image looks nice and clear when all the necessary conditions are at play. Why is it that the mirror does not reflect an image in extreme darkness? And also distort your view of the image when a very dense focus beam of light is thrown at it? It all boils down to a single truth, and that is ; your perfect reflection of who you are is your SHADOW, figuratively speaking. Mirror deceives. Attitude and Character are everything.
One will now notice that, what propels us to succeed are not the TANGIBLE stuff. This narrative shows that the presence of skepticism and obstacles will always accompany us on our journey to success because the moment we take away suffering from success, we lose CHARACTER. Sometimes the part of the journey we don’t see serves as the main catalysts for success and when things hit the rock bottom, it will take only FAITH in the form of courage to keep going. Without faith and self believe, one is bound to give up.
Thirdly, in his book “ OUTLIERS”, Malcolm Gladwell explicitly spelt out that it takes 10,000 hours of intensive Interntional practice to achieve mastery of complex skills and materials. Meaning, a skill is developed by putting in efforts over time.
Now, how many millennials are willing and will be able to spend 10,000 hours working on their skills to achieve mastery?
This unravels the truth that people give up because they are not patients enough to work and put in long hours without seeing any results for sometime.
Instant gratification has caused millions of people to give up on destiny changing and disruptive businesses and great ideas.
Facebook, for seven years operated without making a cent as a revenue but was patients enough to build this great empire that we know today as ‘Metaverse’ .
Being strategically patients in your business and with your dreams to allow things to mature into glory while you put in the work is a great asset and a competitive advantage.
Many people also give up when they encounter problems in their endeavours because of the lack of creativity and innovative thinking. In our world today, one is always going to face challenges in anything valuable you decide to pursue.
The people who win and get through are those who strived to provide solutions to the problems they encountered in a creative way.
Critical thinking is an art one can master to avoid giving up when the storms appear in one’s life and business. Dexterity is out of bounce.
Finally, pain and suffering are life transformative pillars and enablers. One can always be optimistic and perceive pain and suffering as a call to action in life and our business.
However, before one gets transformed through pain and suffering, one would have to learn to endure for a while.
Pain and suffering has a purpose and it is to teach you and leave you once it is done teaching you. What happens afterwards is that, it builds and develops you. It makes you stronger!!!!!
The problem of this generation is that, we have not developed the coping mechanism to effectively and profitably deal with pressure, pain and suffering. And this undeveloped mechanism is called GRIT.
As a result of lack of GRIT, we fall prey and give up anytime we encounter pain.
To sum this up, the world at it pinnacle has a table of greatness. The only people who gets to sit round this table are those who NEVER GAVE UP.
Keep hope alive and focus on your dreams. Impossible is NOTHING!!!!!!
NEVER. EVER. GIVE. UP!!!!!!!!
Note: The author is an aspiring Public Speaking practitioner