Overcoming Hardships

No one escapes life without facing obstacles and hardships. Each life is unique in this manner and each obstacle is different than others. Sometimes we think that nobody is going through what we are and that we are alone. Many use this as an excuse for failure. They try to use this excuse of difficulties to fool others, yet fail to realize that they are only fooling themselves.

Today I got the opportunity to hear Dominic Carter speak about overcoming hardships in life. Dominic grew up in the projects of New York City. His father was never around and his mother suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, leaving him in a tough position growing up. He went though foster care and knew what it was like to be poor, not having anything to eat and no money to live on. As he grew up, he seemed to be an average type person and never thought he would grow into anything special. He figured he would be a product of his environment and end up like the rest of his friends; either dead or in jail. However, this attitude changed the day his guidance counselor told him something. Upon asking for a financial aid packet for college, his counselor remarked “Why waste your time? You’ll either be in jail or dead”. This was the defining moment that pushed Dominic to crave success. From that moment forward, he worked as hard as he could to prove that he was not a failure nor would he be another statistic. As the years passed, he graduated from Cortland in three years with a BA in journalism and continued onto Syracuse University. Now he is one of the leading journalists in America and has gained success which most only dream of. He started with nothing and he’s raised himself up to the top on his own.

The main point to his speech was that at the end of the day, if you have failed, you have nobody to blame but yourself. There are no excuses to be heard because you chose not to give it your all. If you want something badly enough, there is nobody who can stand in your way except yourself. In an attempt to make everyone understand what he meant, he used the example of a train. If a train is on course heading for its destination, nothing can stop it. It keeps going until it stops. That stop is up to the conductor and nobody else. I’m sure you got the reference that the train is your goal and the conductor is you. In the end, nobody can stop you but yourself. When you come across an obstacle, you must persevere and flip the bad into good.

In order to find success in life, you have to be able to learn to turn the negatives into positives. For example, a young girl is in a car accident and loses the use of the lower half of her body. After all of the pain and rough times, she still has a very optimistic attitude and she uses her new personality she has gained from her trials to help her continue on. She took her hardship and turned it into strength. This young girl has accomplished something many people never do. She has learned how to overcome hardships. She has taught herself to live on despite her circumstances. If she wouldn’t had learned this, she would had lost her life, not in the sense of death, but in the sense of never accomplishing anything and allowing time to slip from her until it is too late to get it back.

In order to overcome obstacles in your way, you have to find a way to push yourself past them. You have to find a way to control your mind to believe that you can accomplish anything that you need to in life. You have to train yourself to always believe in your potential and forget about those who tell you that you can’t do something. If you allow yourself to listen to people who are negative towards you, then you are only allowing yourself to fail. If you let this negativity be around you or a part of you, you will never have the ability to push yourself forwards past it. At first you may have the strength, but as time goes by, it removes your ability to succeed and brings you down to a level that is hard to rise up from. When it comes to overcoming your difficulties, everyone has to do it a different way. Sometimes it’s by using the negativity towards you to propel you forward whereas other times it may be using your personal difficulties to drive your success. It does not matter which way you find to move you. What matters is your strength and need for a good future.

It doesn’t matter if you are young or old, black or white, male or female, rich or poor. It doesn’t matter where you start out. What matters is where you are going. The past is gone, but the future is constantly being built. Every decision we make, everything we do, shapes our future and lays down the path of ours to follow. We cannot rely on others to make this path for us, only we can do it. In the end, it is up to us whether or not we want to succeed in life. Hard work is the only way we will ever accomplish anything true for ourselves. There are no tricks and definitely no excuses.