Do not judge me by my success, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.
Do not judge me by my success, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.
NELSON MANDELA
When you hit a setback, do you retreat and give up, or do you regroup and try again?
A defeat may be perceived as the ultimate conclusion, or it may be perceived as a sign post that there is something about your situation that needs improvement… so that the next time… you succeed.
This is as much a perspective issue, as not, in most cases. There are specific defeats from which there may be no additional opportunity, and yet, even those kinds of defeats are those that are still teaching you aspects of what you have as your strengths, and helping you to differentiate what may not be the greatest attributes for success in that particular category.
If we are quick to discover one of these categories in which we have not prevailed to our own satisfaction, we come to a re-joining position with our inner being in which we must fully evaluate, with core honesty, what went right, what went wrong, and what would need to improve.
In the course of that evaluation comes one of the greatest life learning opportunities that I have encountered. In any defeat that I have suffered, there has always been a lesson waiting for me. It may not be a lesson that I want, nor a lesson that I desire, but in the end, that is wholly immaterial, because a lesson is a lesson, and we are either wise enough to view and perceive it as such, or we are missing one of the biggest categories of feedback for improvement that we might potentially avail ourselves of, as our lives continue.
If you expect yourself to be perfect at everything from the outset, you are going into life with a delusional perspective that will most certainly leave you wanting and disappointed. But, if you recognize that it’s only through these opportunities that you are going to grow, you might discover that what you had initially perceived as perfection on your end, was still fully capable of maturing into something even better than you might have imagined, as a result of you having leveraged the lessons that came your way, and benefiting from them, in every way possible.
I wrote about a back injury that I had last year, and there was a period where I was starting to wonder if I was going to be seeing the rest of my life in a wheelchair. Today as I checked into the gym, I got my announcement on my app that this was my 300th workout since my back injury had been healed. I looked at that milestone and thought to myself “a year ago, I never would’ve thought that I would ever be at this stage, except for the fact that I never lost sight of the fact that my brain was an integral component to the healing process, and that if my mind was not fully on board with what I was doing, I was most likely going to find myself confined to that wheelchair.”
Only through realistic perspective, and willingness to fall down and get right back up again, as #NelsonMandela has so aptly inferred, may we ever find our own true greatness. Fall down 7 times, stand up 8 times.
Happy Saturday!
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