Behind every success story, one common element needs to be sacrificed very early on. That element is: your willingness to pay the price for achieving success. The pain is that the price got to be paid fully and in advance. The price is the ticket that allows you to enter the club of the elite. The price takes various intangible forms. One form is the intensity of your passion and desire that turn you into a burning flame. Another form is doing without daily pleasures and socialization. A third form is putting everything in your life on hold for the sake of achieving mastery in a specific field. The price takes many forms.
Why is that so many of us know what to do to succeed and how to do it and yet fail? Many fail because of the high price we are incapable of paying. Our inward resistance accounts for 80% of the price to be paid; the other 20% is the outward resistance. The outward resistance is instant gratification and how society conditions us to consume much and act on impulse that makes us impatient and more competitive. Competitiveness breeds greed and greed makes us unwilling to sacrifice short-term pains for the sake of long-term rewards.
The beauty of inward resistance, so to speak, is that it is within our circle of influence. Our body and mind resist change. Both hate the unknown and both thrive in systems while our heart and soul welcome change. To succeed, we need to be aware of our inner resistance towards change. That awareness comes from our souls. This awareness pierces through our hearts and motivates it. That energy flows into our mind that starts to visualize the possibility of making success despite the inner resistance. The more positive emotions we give to visualization, the more our body responds to our mind. The process of overcoming resistance is inside-out. It starts with our soul through our mind and body.
Our leader today is the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He found out, in his childhood, what God has called him to do. More importantly, he was aware of the price that got to be paid beforehand. He declared later in his life that: “Since I was born, I knew I would be a writer. I was ready to starve to death in order to be a writer.” And so he did. After two years of studying law, he abandoned the university to practice the profession of journalism. He was assigned as a reporter to Europe then returning back to Venezuela where he was nearly arrested during a random sweep by a military police. He turned to screenwriting to earn a living. His dream of writing his best novel never left him for nearly 16 years.
When the time of writing his masterpiece has come, he started writing his novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. It took him 18 months to write it. To support his family, he sold his car and anything and everything that would bring in cash. When he finished writing it, he was almost broke so much so that he sends off half of the manuscript to his publisher in Buenos Aires by mail. The novel has been translated into nearly 40 languages and has sold over 30 million copies. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on December 1982.
Every success story comes with a price to be paid in advance. Your willingness and commitment to pay it beforehand is the ticket that drives you through joining the minority that make a difference in their lives and the lives of those around them.
