Ride on your habit to success

Life is an unending journey of success and failures, if you really see it in correct perspective, life is an unending journey of success, interspersed with training and learning sessions.  Failure is an experiment which didn’t go as planned, or didn’t give expected result, but even this failed experiment would bring you closer to success, should you choose to evaluate the reason, and update your diary of learning.

Successful people are those people who knew how to handle their failures.  Handling failure is really important because failure doesn’t come alone, it brings in many by products like disappointment, depression, feeling bad, negativity trap, feeling victim, having self-pity syndrome. All these are fatal to a person’s motivation, motivation to move ahead.  These negative by-products can push a person in the downward spiral of depression.

An ordinary person, whenever he is confronted with failure or setback, there is an expected and predictable behaviour which he demonstrates. Why almost every person irrespective of country, religion, gender, ethnicity behaves identically? Is it instinctive? If it is instinctive then animals or at least other primates should also behave similarly, whenever a monkey is not able to jump from one branch to other, it should sit in a corner and sulk, or when a lion is not able to catch his pray after running after it for a mile, should stop hunting for few days, and start asking questions about his ability to hunt.  I suppose all of us, who are national geographic, or discovery channel watchers know that; though anger, and competitive behaviour are seen in animals but never self-pity and sulking. So mourning failure is not instinctive. Is it genetic? With so many successful people around us from all kind of social, financial, ethnic, religious backgrounds in every walk of life, it is unlikely. So, it must be an acquired behaviour through observation from one of our sulking ancestors. Then this behaviour got reinforced through repeated actions and turned into a habit.

What is a habit? Habit is a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up. We have many habits such reinforced that if we are made to act against those habits, we feel uncomfortable. Habits are born out of another trait – “living in comfort zone” that is, if one course of action is assumed to be good, or has been good, lets follow that, no changes are required; status quo is the best “quo”.  Repeating yesterday is the safest strategy to survival, at least that is what most people think and don’t see that the cheese is gradually moving and going out of their reach, very soon they won’t have any left, unless they change their habit, shift gears and start moving in the search of new cheese. Which is the only common sense and a logical thing to do.  (This analogy is from DR. Spencer Johnson’s best seller book – “Who Moved My Cheese”).

We have the habit for a purpose, a perfect reason, Constructive habits can take the form of personal success rituals – actions you perform almost automatically and that help you boost your Bounce Back Ability Quotient. How do successful people handle failures and setbacks?  How are they able to handle failure in their stride?  They know, they need a ritual that is (at least) as powerful as their disappointments, something that helps them place thigs in perspective when they experience a challenge or lose a little altitude on the way to achieving a goal. That’s the kind of habit that we would want to develop and reinforce.

It is easy to lose perspective when you’ve been working toward a goal for a while. Setbacks can seem like disasters, because you’ve been working so hard and because you’re so close to the action. Habit can be a tool to help you overcome those feelings of discomfort, and depression that can set in when things seem larger than they really are.

As a rule, habit loves status quo. Yet, when habit is turned into a method of progress on a continuing basis, habit can be put to very good use. As the foundation of a personal success ritual – for instance, a willingness to ask yourself, “What did I learn from this situation, and how can I apply it to the next challenge I face?” – habit can result in a new and stronger commitment to your goal and essential “backup plans” that will benefit you down the line.

If your habit helps you to grow more, to break from the status quo, to make the right-hand turn out of the familiar and into the zone of high achievement, then habit can be beneficial. It can help you exceed your “personal best” again and again. And while physical record-breaking can usually go on only for so long, the habitual development of new mental areas can help you continue to break barriers for a lifetime.

Thomas Edison was one of the most successful innovators in American history. He was the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” a larger-than-life hero who seemed almost magical for the way he snatched ideas from thin air. But the man also stumbled, sometimes tremendously. In response to a question about his missteps, Edison once said, “I have not failed 10,000 times—I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”

As a young man, Abraham Lincoln went to war a captain and returned a private. Afterwards, he was a failure as a businessman. As a lawyer in Springfield, he was too impractical and temperamental to be a success. He turned to politics and was defeated in his first try for the legislature, again defeated in his first attempt to be nominated for congress, defeated in his application to be commissioner of the General Land Office, defeated in the senatorial election of 1854, defeated in his efforts for the vice-presidency in 1856, and defeated in the senatorial election of 1858. At about that time, he wrote in a letter to a friend, "I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth."

I have also mentioned about our own Amitabh Bachchan in one of my earlier posts, he was rejected by All India Radio, as his voice was not found to be “radio worthy”; his earlier movies didn’t work, but he held on, he had formed that habit of holding on, and that habit worked for him, when he was down and out after losing a fortune on a misadventure, he could gather himself and relaunch himself into a very successful almost enviable second innings.