Hope is not cancelled!

Martin Luther King quoted "We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope.” Because, history is full of awesome stories about people who came into hard times, lost hope, and gave up. We rarely come to learn what would have happened with these individuals if they had given up. We are left to wonder what great successes these people might have achieved if they had chosen to hold on to hope. And how might they have gone on to shape our world for the better?

And on the flip side we find that history is full of stories of people who also came into hard times, but they made a very different set of choices in their lives. Rather than losing hope and giving up, they chose to pick themselves up, brush themselves off, and continue moving with the hope toward achieving their dreams.

But none of us are immune from falling into difficult times. That plight is something we all have in common. Another thing we all have in common is the ability to choose how we are going to react to the difficult times when they come. Will we allow them to destroy our hope for the future or will we decide to view them as a learning experience meant to help us as we continue to move forward with hope that the best is yet to come.

And a sad reality for those who lose hope and give us is the realization that had they kept going just a little farther the success they desired could have been theirs. Here are the two examples that illustrate that. The First is is back in 1868 in Park City, Utah silver was discovered in the mountains. Thousands of miners came to town seeking their fortunes. In 1912, Solon Spiro started digging in Spiro Mine hoping to find ore. He was exhausted and broke and he gave up and sold his mine. Just 23 feet later the new owners found a massive ore vein worth a fortune.

Then it is about Roy Raymond who founded Victoria Secret and five years into it he sold it for 4 million dollars. Within a few years the company was worth billions of dollars. Distraught that he had given up too soon he ended up taking his own life. What a tragic irony that he took his life which was the ultimate measure of giving up over having given up too soon. If only he had kept going he may have found that even greater successes lay ahead for him. Now let’s take a look at examples of some great individuals who chose not to give up. They chose to keep pushing forward despite facing hardships and failures and ultimately found inspiring success in their lives: Henry Ford had five major business failures before founding Ford Motor Company. Lucille Ball early in her career was considered a failure as an actress, unable to land anything but B grade movie roles. She went on to win four Emmys and a lifetime achievement award. Soichiro Honda who after being turned down for a job with Toyota he decided to make scooters from his own home until his neighbors talked him into starting his own company, Honda. Our own Bill Gates was dropped out of Harvard and started a business called Traf-O-Data which failed. Instead of giving up he decided to start a little company called Microsoft. Walt Disney was fired from his job with a newspaper because he was told lacked imagination and didn’t have any good ideas. He went on to create Disney’s empire. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team which was a heartbreaking experience for any teenager. Then he became one of the greatest basketball players in the history of the game.

 Then there is inspiring story of Jack Ma. He experienced many failures in his life. He wanted to go to college but had trouble passing the entrance exam. On his first attempt he scored a meager 1 out of 120 possible points on the math portion of the exam. On his second try he failed again, and barely passed on his third attempt, which allowed him to enroll in the less-than-prestigious Hangzhou Teacher’s Institute. Upon graduation he was rejected for over a dozen positions, including a role at Kentucky Fried Chicken where all of the other 24 applicants were accepted.

Ultimately he got a job teaching English at a local university. Yet when he discovered the internet in 1995 while visiting a friend in the United States, he saw an opportunity to bring the world wide web to China. Here is an individual who barely made it into college, had failed at most of what he had done to date, whose only real job was as an English teacher and translator, who knew nothing about computers or e-mail or the internet. Yet his first reaction upon seeing the internet was to think he could add value and do something monumental. And he did when he created Alibaba from scratch and became one of the richest men in the world.

These inspiring people had learned a valuable lesson, and that is, “You have to fight through some bad days to earn the best days of your life.” I truly believe we can accomplish just about anything if we are willing to do what it takes to work for it and if we stay determined in our resolve. And when hard times come, as they most assuredly will, we must never allow ourselves to lose hope that the best is yet to come. Stay Blessed ! #kishoreshintre #possessedbywritingspirit #ks1000articles #proudtobeindian