No matter your past, your future is spotless. Starting right now, you can make it whatever you want it to be. What happened earlier today, yesterday, last week or at any other time in the past is over. It cannot be changed. The only thing you can do now is learn from it. If your history is littered with mistakes and failures, you have lots of lessons to help you succeed moving forward. If success has been part of your history, look back to it as evidence that you are capable of achieving your goals. Whether your history is filled with success or failure, and it probably has both, it has no bearing on your future. It has shaped you and prepared you for today, so that you can write the next chapter of your life.
But that next chapter is a blank page until you start writing it. You get to choose the direction you will go and the actions you will take moving forward. The lessons from your past will inform the decisions you make today, but they will not dictate them. Today you can choose to break old habits and embrace new ones. You are not bound by them unless you choose to be. Nothing requires you to continue heading in the same direction as yesterday. Starting now, you can chart a new course for your life and start writing that next great chapter.
Walt Disney was fired from the Kansas City Star for not having enough imagination. JK Rowling was a divorced, single mother living on welfare when she began writing the Harry Potter series. Oprah Winfrey was publicly fired from a Baltimore TV station because she was too emotionally invested in her stories. Thomas Edison said he had not failed but found 10,000 ways it would not work, when he was asked about the light bulb. Sir James Dyson spent more than 15 years and 5,126 failed prototypes for his vacuum. But his 5,127th design was a success and his company is now estimated to be worth more than $4 billion. In his basketball career, Michael Jordan missed more than 9,000 shots, including 26 which would have been the game-winning shots. Stephen King’s first novel, Carrie, was rejected 30 times.
All of these people achieved greatness because they continued to persevere. They did not allow the failures of their past to dictate the future. Rather, they used the lessons from those failures to learn, grow and become better. JK Rowling said, “Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy to finishing the only work that mattered to me.”
The road to your success will be paved with failures. The important thing is that you keep moving forward and traveling that road. Remember that each day is a fresh start and a new opportunity. The past cannot be changed, but your future is waiting for you with open arms, inviting you to achieve all of your greatest ambitions, dreams and goals. Now you just have to go do it.
Until next time, Fight On!
Black Alder 