Essay On The Road To Success

It’s impossible to lead a life devoid of disasters and set backs. Most of the world’s successful people have had times when they’ve had good reason to consider themselves to be failures. That was the experience of William James, who said: ‘Take the happiest man, the one most envied in the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure.’ It isn’t a sin to fail; the real crime is to a failure to attempt. There was an American who failed in business in ’31 and was defeated in politics the following year. Two years later he suffered another business disaster. Soon after, he suffered a nervous breakdown. When he recovered, he had the nerve to make an unsuccessful bid to become a US congressman. The man with that chequered past was Abraham Lincoln, who to begin with might have been written off as one of life’s born losers, but who had the perseverance to shrug off his early reverses and become one of America’s greatest Presidents. His story provides living testimony to the fact that men and women are defeated only when they stop trying.

Many people fail, not through a dearth of talent, but from a lack of perseverance. Frederick Forsyth was fifty-three before he got his first book published. The book – The Day of the

You’re bound to have the occasional lapse if you’re going through a period of change, or are trying to correct a long established negative habit. To inventors and engineers there’s no such thing as failure – only feedback. In his drive to create an effective light bulb Edison carried out over a thousand unsuccessful experiments. When asked if he wasn’t discouraged by all these failures, and tempted to give up, he replied: ‘Those were steps on the way. In each attempt I was successful in finding a way not to create a light bulb. I was always eager to learn, even from my