Encouragement

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Success

Over the years my view of success has changed, from a feeling that I always have to succeed and being driven to achieve it, to where I have experienced some benefits from failing. There are things to gain by failing! I still believe in trying to succeed but do not have the same dread of failing. I have seen that in the midst of failure you can gain attributes of life that cause your inner person to grow.
The outward things like making money, gaining material things, having the best car or house, having success with friends and family were all important but now I see that in reality they are not always achieved and I do not consider the need for success in those areas with the same compulsion or fear as before. A life lesson was learned about failure the first time I was fired from a job where I thought I was doing an excellent job. In fact I was expecting a promotion at that time. I was in shock when instead of a promotion I found myself escorted to the door five minutes after I was told that my position was being eliminated. Then I was standing outside with a cardboard box containing the contents of my desk in my hands wondering what had just happened.
I had been thinking everyday for the previous year that I was going to be a success there and now was slammed in the face with the understanding that the people in charge had a different view. I drove home with a sick feeling in my stomach and imagined that my wife would react with tears. When I got home I opened the newspaper to the help wanted section and an advertisement jumped out at me looking for a representative to do the same job that I just had been fired from. I called the number and when my competitor from the job I had been fired from answered the phone I quickly hung up. I laughed at myself for still being loyal to my old employer. Then I called back and found myself negotiating for the “competition” to hire me. I received a two dollar an hour raise, better benefits and better working conditions. That is how I learned the lesson of sometimes it’s a promotion to get fired. I encountered success in the midst of failure and I later bounced into management in that industry and actually had the highest position with another company a few years later. I succeeded in being promoted by putting forth all my efforts and hard work and being fired didn’t stop me.
The feeling of having to succeed is a constant voice within telling you that you can do it. Even when the task was impossible I would hear from within “you can do it”.
Another voice was always there too telling me it was not good to fail. I never talked back to that voice. The consequences of failure were imagined to be that my life would be over if I ever failed. Now after many years of life I can ask that fear of failure voice questions such as; “can you do it if there is too much to do“,” can you do it when you have a crises and your life is falling apart” or “can you do it if you lose your health“. I have learned in those situations some hard lessons that maybe you can’t do it. Sometimes when you can’t do it you gain things that are not outward but inward. You gain an understanding of how much you can do. You gain an understanding of your inner strength when you are pushed beyond your limits and you gain an understanding of how to love yourself. Once you love yourself then all of a sudden you have compassion for others experiencing the same things where as before I would have the attitude that I was strong and everyone else was weak.
Until I participated in what was to be a labor of Bible Study for several months I thought I could do anything I put my mind to. I heard that voice inside yelling at me “you can do it”, as I was sitting in the orientation where one of the instructors was telling us that we all were going to fail as they were going to give us so much to do that it was impossible. We were going to have too much to read and too much to learn. Too much to understand and we were not going to be able to do it. I heard the voice say over and over “you can do it”. I can laugh now as a few weeks later I was admitting to myself that I couldn't do it. There was too much to read and too much to understand . It was impossible.
To my surprise I found out though that everyone was in the same boat and we all couldn’t do it. We all tried our best but we all failed. In that shared experience instead of thinking I was strong and they were weak we all realized we all are weak and out of that I found a love and compassion for them and experienced their love and compassion for me. To this day I still have them as friends even though they are from all over the country and are far away in distance. So even though we all failed we all gained the most we could and above that we gained an appreciation for one another that is more than precious. So over the years I have learned that it is good to fail and sometimes in failing you gain success and some things that are even better than success.

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