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Struggling for Success Doesn’t Mean You’re Failing in Life.
Have you ever noticed that when you’re making efforts towards achieving a particular goal, and the efforts have not yielded fruits, other people tend to see your efforts as failing?
It happened to me, and that is a story I want to share, with you, here.
Here’s my story.
My first-ever employment in life was a bank job, with one of the first-generation commercial banks in my country.
I secured the job in July 1982, during the Federation Internationale de Football Association, FIFA, World Cup hosted by Spain.
While I was working with the bank, I was also sitting for my banking and accountancy professional examinations.
After a few years at the bank, I started losing interest in the banking job and numeracy in general and wanted something more challenging and more interesting.
Before that time, I had started making success in creative writing, which I found more challenging and more interesting than my bank job.
When I discussed my loss of interest in my bank job with one of my aunties, she was very upset with me.
“You mean you want to abandon a bank job that many people are dying to get?” she queried me disappointedly.
She couldn’t listen to hear me out when I wanted to tell her my reason for wanting to leave the bank. All she wanted was for me to rescind my decision.
As soon as I was fully convinced that I didn’t need the bank job again, I left, without discussing the matter again with anybody.
I left the bank when I had almost completed my professional banking and accounting examinations and with no hope of another job, but I wasn’t bothered.
I wasn’t bothered because my passion for writing was burning like a wildfire inside me.
Another reason I left the bank was that a veteran journalist had commended my writing skill, which nobody taught me, with a piece of advice for me to try my hands in journalism.
With that positive advice, I decidedly left the bank for journalism school, where I studied print journalism.
Before you knew it, I was through with my journalism training.
I made several efforts to secure a journalism job after my journalism training, but I couldn’t.
In the absence of that, I decided to go into freelancing with different media organisations, selling stories and news to them.
I did that for some time until I found permanent jobs, one after the other, with different print-media organisations.
I left the last media organization I worked for in 1991 to start my own publishing firm, with a view to starting publishing an entertainment magazine, christened Showboat.
Unfortunately, that effort did last long due to some irreconcilable differences between me and my sponsor, who wanted so many returns on his investment in my magazine.
After mourning the death of my ephemeral magazine, I decided to go into the business of printing, with the printing experience I garnered from the media houses I worked for in the past.
Unfortunately, again, my printing business was full of struggles because I had no printing machines, which was one of the criteria for securing printing contracts in Nigeria, at that time.
While struggling with my printing business, I came across a back-issue of an American-published Internet magazine at the popular CMS Bus-stop in Lagos, Nigeria, which spurred me to fall in love with the Internet and to learn more about it.
With my knowledge of how the Internet works and how it is used, I started teaching other people who wanted to know what I knew about the Internet.
As I was teaching the Internet and making some money from it, I was spending the money on learning how to sell on the Internet and how to develop and design Websites.
The greatest challenge I had learning how to develop and design Websites was the lack of a personal computer to practice what I was taught and to learn more.
In the alternative, I had to patronize cybercafés, which were in vogue in Nigeria at that time.
The challenge I faced using cybercafés was the high cost of using their services. Because of that challenge, I had to limit my use of the cafés to only once or twice a week.
After acquiring the knowledge of developing and designing Websites, I made several efforts to secure clients who needed Websites, but that effort did not yield any fruits, as most of the people I prospected, at that time, did not understand why they needed Websites.
As a result of the ensuing frustration, I abandoned Web development and design and started the grooming and marketing of young soccer players to some Federation International de Football Association, FIFA, agents and scouts.
While doing my sports marketing business, somebody betrayed me against one of the FIFA agents that I was working with, forcing me to leave sports marketing and return to Web development and design.
Instead of prospecting for clients who needed Websites, on my return to the Web development and design business, I decided to develop and design Websites for myself, which I used for my own online business.
I did that with ease because I had good writing skills, which was one of the most important skills that every Internet content creator needed to succeed online.
As I was moving from one job to the other and carrying out different work experiments, my wife and some of my friends were constantly urging and advising me to forget about the Internet and go and look for a paid job with my accounting and banking qualifications.
I didn’t mind them because I was convinced inside of me that there was hope and a future in what I was doing.
In short, the more they pressurized me to go and look for a paid job and abandon the Internet, the more I get encouraged to continue doing what I was doing.
And today, I am a fulfilled and happy information and communications technology, ICT, entrepreneur cum consultant; just because I believed in the quote that says: “Just because you’re struggling doesn’t mean you’re failing.”
I was strongly convinced, within me, that the fact that I was struggling didn’t mean that I was failing.
Whenever you’re pursuing a goal that you so much believe in, please, keep up the fight with passion and conviction, and at the appointed time, you’ll achieve your goal.
Struggling for Success Doesn’t Mean You’re Failing in Life.
The fact that you’re struggling to make it happen doesn’t mean you’re failing.
This explains why Nicky Gumbel says: “Just because you are struggling does NOT mean you are failing. Every great success requires some kind of struggle to get there.”
Do you know how many people may have tried to discourage Thomas Edison in his attempt to succeed with his discovery?
Don’t allow ANYBODY to discourage you in what you know and believe in and what you know is achievable.
Resist any attempt for you to fall by the way-side.
“Never, never, never, give up,” says Sir Winston Churchill.
“Just because you fail once, it doesn’t mean you’re going to fail at everything,” advises Norma Jeane Mortenson, popularly known as Marilyn Monroe.
“Keep trying, hold on, and always, always, always believe in yourself because if you don’t, then who will?
“So, keep your head high, keep your chin up, and most importantly, keep smiling because life’s a beautiful thing and there’s so much to smile about.”
Struggling for Success Doesn’t Mean You’re Failing in Life. THE END.
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