I was always in favor of this metaphoric picture about life, someone once told me:”life is a sailing trip”, picture yourself in that sailing boat, and you may think of, and worry about, only whatever you have control on. The sail, the sides, maybe the capacity of it, yes, you can think of them, since you are in control and can change them to your favor, but if you spend your time worrying about what you don’t have control on… well I can tell you, you’d be spending time, efforts, nerves and emotions on things you cannot possibly change, resist or even have a say in, and eventually, you would not be able to work around them with the factors that you have control on.
My formula about life and its significance has three components:
- Luck: definitely we need luck, and thank god it comes proportionally to anyone, and let’s not kid ourselves, we’ve all seen through our journey people who were not so lucky, and on the other hand, we have all seen also people who were so lucky and are what they are now thanks to their luck. On another perspective, we all have good days and bad days, moments that are so lucky you’d wish you can buy a lottery ticket, and moments that you just wish the day ends just to limit your losses of it. Having said that, this proves that luck knocks on all doors, proportionally again, yet, thank god, it does.
- Hard work: this one is a classic; if you want something done, you should work hard for it. Hard workers often get the compensation and luxury they want from life because of the amount of work and effort they put to earn it. Taking a look back at our lives, it would be clear to anyone that hard work have paid off, sooner or later, it eventually did. Here the factor of experience is always a gain, even from situations that we considered failures at the time.
- Attitude: this factor is so confusing on a first look; yet, it’s the factor that pushed you to do things you never thought you could ever possibly do. It’s the mix of emotions that either made you want something badly seeking the pleasure in it, or severely hate a situation, that life put you in, which made you change radically and tremendously after having enough of it.
Having listed the above, let’s put them in a formula, and here actually addition and subtraction doesn’t do, because all those components, on daily basis, are multiplied by each others… think about it:
Significance = Hard Work x Luck x Attitude
Sometimes we work so hard for something, and we want it so bad, yet we are faced with bad luck, and we lose the achievement; like being in the right place, in the wrong time, or doing the right thing at the wrong time, or place. Take a perfect football match, in the world cup, where all the hard work and effort is put by the team, who is striving to win, yet, all those shots or opportunities were saved by the post. Here, again, coming back to the “life is a sailing trip example”, we both know that nothing can be done.
But, on the other hand, we all know that a person who worked hard for something, trained themselves day and night to master a certain skill, or a certain topic, and in the right time (the luck shot), they earned it, earned the position they wanted, made the sale they sought, and eventually, grew bigger and better.
The mix of hard work and attitude is in our control… always. Simply knowing what you want, and being determined about it, will enable you to take it further and work hard for it, spend every second that counts to master it, and wait for the perfect time or that luck shot to earn it.
“…in any fight, it’s the man who is willing to die who is gonna win” (Al Pacino in “Any Given Sunday)
How bad do you want it? This is my discussion on getting things done or not! In our lives, we face a lot of situations and circumstances that simply do not make sense, unfair, and cannot be accepted, and we wonder… we wonder why is that woman keeping up with all her husband’s maltreatment? Why is that man still doing that unrewarding job? Why does she smoke? Why does he keep on getting more and more obese? The solutions, to us, are simple, and in our minds, we always wonder… WHY?
The answer is plain: “they did not yet get enough pain from it”, they did not yet build the attitude to change, to resist their current situation, they always resort to them as what they got used to, I call it their comfort zone, yes, comfort zones aren’t always happy, but comfortable.
We tend to stick to what we know, what we acquired from the society as given, we tend to resort to the present situations and we have loads of reasons that are always and only, in our minds only, dependant on the other, and for the other.
Your attitude to do what you want, to achieve what you dreamed about, to ace what others have failed, and how bad you do want it, will only push you forward towards doing it. Without it, hard work and luck simply may not work.
