Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

The problem with this is that most people don’t talk about their struggles but rather about their success. Why would they talk about the struggles, it is not interesting after all and people are often measured by their success not by their problems.

So what you get from them is: ‘I did this, I did that, I achieved X, I rocked Y’ but you don’t get to hear ‘I failed this, I failed that, I slept in and did not do shit today’. Therefore you might easily think that other people just have their shit together and you don’t so you start questioning yourself.

This is especially a problem in times of social media like facebook. You see always the good side of people because they present themselves on their profiles. It is not an accurate picture of the people but rather a mere show-off portfolio where you see Photos from hoildays, from parties, you see cool stuff they did. But that is not what makes the persons who they are, it is just the tip of the iceberg.

Failure and the decision when to keep going is what makes the people who they are. But those things are so personal that most people don’t share them, especially over the internet.

So you should not judge the book by it’s cover meaning you should not be so quick to decide who looks strong (not in terms of physical strength) and who does not. And most important: Getting your sense of strength right will actually help you develop a more confident image of yourself. Once you’ve realised that it is not all about winning but more about the path towards the win you start seeing things more focused and are able to achieve more.

Don’t judge people by the result but by the work they’ve put in. I mean who is more successful in work, the small worker who had to put in a lot of effort in order to get his job and is proud about his work or the rich businessman who actually does a shitty job but inherited the company from his dad?

Always remember: Hard work, failure, getting up again and starting over, that is what makes people awesome! Winning is just the mere result of being a cool person.  You can think about it like you think about a paperchase. Just because you arrived at the target destination first does not mean that you had the most fun at all!

So relax, do what you love and most importantly: Don’t fear to fail but instead fail often, fail greatly and learn from it. If it makes you feel better: Read about people like Michael Jordan, Thomas Edison or other successful people to realise how many thousand times they failed before they started winning.

/phil