How do we know that our breakthrough is near?
Achieving success in life is almost down to a science now. We know what we need to do attain our goals and live the life of our dreams. However the road is usually not easy and things don’t always go as planned. All these difficulties cause many people to give up thinking they will never get to their destination.
It is estimated that most of those who give up do so just before their breakthrough. They had already covered 90% of the journey, and all that was left is a 10%. However those people didn’t know that. If they had known, they might have continued on.
In his book “Think and Grow Rich” Napoleon Hill makes reference to a man called R. U. Darby and his Uncle who went drilling for gold. When they couldn’t find the gold deposits they gave up. However not long after they gave up, gold was discovered just three feet from where the Darbys had stopped. So is there a way to figure out if your success is imminent or is there no way to tell? To answer this question I have done a bit of research. I have looked at the lives of very successful people to see if there was some kind of pattern that I could discern. And what I found is not what you would expect.
What I found is that in most cases just before people got their breakthrough things got worse. People started to experience all kinds of crisis. Sometimes there were multiple crises. These are things that will make you question your sanity and will challenge your very fabric. And this is unfortunately where many fail the test. Those who are millionaires and billionaires today know what I’m talking about. They faced periods of upheaval in their lives and stuck through it. At this time it may seem like everything is turning against you.
Your family may turn against you. You may be accused of being selfish, of only thinking about yourself. The weather may turn against you; equipment that is normally reliable may suddenly start to malfunction. But this is the time when something called “faith” is required. Faith is the evidence of things not seen, of things hoped for. The Bible calls Abraham the called the father of Faith, because he is the first person who is recorded as having shown faith. What did Abraham do? He trusted God to give him a son, even though he and his wife were very old and therefore beyond the age of childbirth.
Abraham later followed the instruction of God to sacrifice his son, the very son that God gave him in a miraculous way. This didn’t make any sense, but still Abraham obeyed, trusting that God knew what he was doing and would somehow offer a way out. Indeed, God provided a way out. He called Abraham just before he killed his son and offering him a ram to be sacrificed instead.
Not many people know this but before Bill Gates got the big breakthrough that made him a household name, he was actually struggling financially. It was a contract by IBM, the world’s first PC maker that saved him. Others faced rejection. The founder of Hotmail Sabeer Bathia was rejected by 19 Venture Capitalists before he found someone who saw the potential of their idea agreed to support it.
On his non-stop around the world airplane flight Steve Fosset’s instruments indicated that he had too little fuel and would not make it to the finish line. He chose not to trust the instruments and to trust his instincts instead. He made it to the end with the fuel that he had. Non-stop around the world balloonists, Brian Jones and Bertrand Piccard, also experienced instrument malfunctions as well as difficult officials in China and India who threatened to refuse them entry into their respective countries. Their instruments also malfunctioned, indicating that they wouldn’t make it to their end destination with the fuel they had. They continued, trusting their gut instead, and became the first people to circumvent the globe non-stop in a balloon. I can give you many more examples of people who had some “impossible” odds against them, yet kept a cool head and made it, in spite of.
So how will you know if your breakthrough is imminent? Look at the things that are happening in your life. Are they getting worse without any seeming cause? Are people going out of their way to make things difficult for you?
Your breakthrough may be just around the corner. So instead of giving up and becoming bitter towards what is happening in your life, accept “what is” and move forward. Forgive those who harmed you or made things difficult for you. Keep on doing the things that you know will bring you the success you crave and before you know it, it will be there.
Tags: patience, personal development, self help, Self Improvement