Obstacles to Achieving Success

Greatest Obstacles of Success: Ability and Persistence

To many people, starting a business feels like taking part in a 25 miles marathon race. Before it begins, hundreds and thousands of people gather at the same starting point with dreams and hopes of reaching the finishing line. Most participants are aiming for the top positions by being among the first few to make through the whole journey while a few are happy just to be taking part. It is pretty much almost impossible to determine who will actually make it through just by looking at them, most of them look strikingly identical. The determined look on their faces and and the eagerness to start.

As the horn sounds and the race begins, little by little the gap starts to widen and you will notice that most of the runners start to fall behind because of the lack of determination, experience and stamina required of the race. But few people drop out in the first ten miles of the marathon race, that’s the easy part, getting started.

So when do the majority of runners give up?

It will probably be in the 15-20 mile range, that’s when legs start to ache, bone begin to hurt, the tummy feels strange, your lungs are grasping for air and morale dips sharply. That’s the hard part. The worse part is knowing that you are lagging behind but can’t see anyone else in front of you, that is a great demoralizing factor and common reason to give up. Just like in business when it feels as though you are not getting ahead, the feeling of doubt kicks in.

Beyond the 20th mile, few people give up, these are the people who have endured the pain within their aching bodies (yes, even the best runners feel pain) and can smell the finishing line just ahead, urging each other on to complete the race because they understand what each other is going through. The competition is still there but each other wants the other party to complete the race with them even though most do not want others to finish ahead of them. To quit when you are almost reaching the finishing line is not only a waste of time to have started the race at all, it may also be devastating to the ego in which a person doubts himself whether he will amount to anything at all in his life because of that specific incident.

A Few Metres Short
Hafid did a land survey and was told that was a 70% chance that there were diamonds buried in his backyard, so he sold off all his property and dug for them but gave up just a few metres shy from reaching the diamonds buried just in front of him because there hasn’t been any results. He sold the plot of land eventually for a small amount of money and the guy who bought the land from him found the diamonds and became very rich.

What if Hafid endured and just dug for just a few metres more?
His life might have been turned out to be very different indeed.

Eventually, the marathon ends and only few hundreds remain out of the hundreds of thousands.

Among those who completed the race, there will be the titans, those who finished the race in record time and these are the few who get their faces and names recognized by the majority of the public, the famous bunch. For example, in the business world, the top two richest people in the world, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are the most well known while I would think that not many people can name the rest of the top twenty richest people in the world, even though they are billionaires as well.

So how can we overcome the obstacles regarding the lack of experience, keeping morale up and stamina?
These will be issues we will be discussing about in future.

edited: original photo by Paul Keleher