What doesn’t Kill you

By Herbert Mtowo
Ladies and Gentleman, it is official: A new study has concluded that experiencing "adverse life events" not only makes you stronger but more satisfied with your life. This study also found that people who sail through life with ease or face less frequent adversity usually do not fare as well compared to those that do. Due to this information, researchers came to the conclusion that »people are more resilient than we thought and happier because of it."
Have you ever experienced an emotional, financial, or personal setback? Has that setback ever been a key to your success?
Personifications of Marriott’s quote are available throughout America’s rich history. For instance, Babe Ruth struck out a ridiculous 1,330 times in his professional baseball career, but because of his willingness to continue on after failure Ruth went on to amass the record-setting tally of 714 home runs. R.H. Macy failed an incredible 7 times before his Flagship Macy’s Department store of New York City caught on! The great Walt Disney, creator of Disney Motion Pictures and DisneyWorld, failed numerous times, and even suffered a nervous breakdown and lost his home, before he was able to develop a successful cartoon about a mouse named Mickey. The moral of these great American success stories is that the most amazing successes are more often than not built upon early adversities. Therefore, it is important to bear in mind that only out of adversity can massive success truly be born, and it is our job as humans striving for excellence to turn these adversities into eventual successes.
One important key to turning your adversities into amazing successes is the importance of seeing your adversities as a bump in the road and not the end of the road. Your adversities are integral parts of the development process that prepares you for eventual success.
A second important key to turning adversity into success is one’s attitude. Answer this question: do you see your glass as half full or half empty? Or, more grammatically, do you see your current adversity as a “setback-period” or as a “setback-comma”? I ask this because as children we were all taught that there were two punctuation marks, each being critica l to our ability to effectively learn to read and write. These two punctuation marks were the period and the comma. A period means the end of a sentence or end story, automatically implying that there is no more to be said or communicated, whereas a comma signifies a pause in the thought, with more to come in the sentence or story! When we have a setback, which we all will experience at some point or another in this life, we have the choice of deciding if this is particular setback will be a period or a comma in our life’s story. I encourage you to see life’s challenges as a comma and not a period, but you are the one who must make the choice.
Remember that your attitude determines how you see and respond to the adversity that you are facing. As Bob Johnson, the founder of BET and current billionaire, once wrote, “Adversity can either make you or break you! The same hammer that breaks the glass happens to be the same hammer tha t sharpens the steel!” Hence, your eventual success or failure all depends on the positivity or negativity of your attitude and