BE SUCCESSFUL! BE PERSISTENT

Dear Readers,

Let me tell you a story.

Once a man prayed to God for many years.  God was happy with his prayer.  He appeared to him and told him to ask any blessing he wanted.

The man replied, “O, God! Give me the blessing of immortality.”

God was in a tight spot.  Human beings were not immortal.  Only gods were so.  He thought long and hard and ultimately gave the man a bottle filled with nectar. 

He said to the man, “This is the drink of the gods.  It gives immortality.  You drink it once daily exactly at 4 in the morning and you will never die.  But if you fail to drink it even one day, you will die immediately.  This nectar inside the bottle is inexhaustible.  It will fill itself daily.”

The man became very happy and thanked God profusely.  God only smiled enigmatically.

The man started drinking the contents of the bottle regularly.  But soon he found following the routine difficult.  He found it a great burden to get up early in the morning just to drink the nectar.  He also thought perhaps God had played a cruel joke on him and there was nothing special in the liquid inside the bottle.  It tasted just like plain water.

Day by day he found it difficult to get up at 4 a.m. just to drink the water.

One day he totally neglected to drink the nectar and died immediately!

Well, the moral of the story is that it is practically impossible for human beings to stick to a routine.

And that is the reason of fall of the man (and woman) right from Adam and Eve.  Had they stuck to their routine life and food, they would not have been tempted to taste the apple.

The difference between success and failure is this: Sticking to the routine of working hard and working hard day in and day out.

Well, I said that it is not possible humanly.  But stick to it as much as possible, at least stick to it more than another person, and you will be successful.

Well, what are the lessons of our Odyssey with the Web?

The most important one, and the first, is overnight success is impossible.  It is not even possible in a few months, perhaps not even in one or two years.  You have to slog it out for many years.

This should not come as a surprise.  Doctors, engineers, and MBs etc. study for years to learn their trade.   Then they require many more years to get established.  Then only the more persistent and the best ones taste success.   All claims of instant and early success are lies.

Let us take Internet business itself.  Those who sell us sure success formulas for these claim that we could be successful on Internet overnight or within a month.  Far from it.

You may take days, months, and may be years, thinking to day something on Internet!  Even when you are ready you may take days, months, and may be years, to plan exactly what you want to do, get domain name (s), server, and most importantly, somebody who could design a website exactly according to your wishes.  He or she will take his or her sweet time to make it.  If it is a friend or relative who is doing it for you free, it may never see the light of the day.  One have emergencies and other preoccupations!

Once your website is ready, you would find that there are many things wrong with it.  Belatedly you realize that you must learn elementary, and later advanced, web designing, intricacies of learning all about your web server.

But it does not stop there.  You have to learn all about search engines and submission to them, ezines and ezine advertising, copywriting, creating and uploading files, traffic exchanges, and thousands of other things.  You wish you had full time to devote to your Internet business.  But you are still a part timer.  And so far no money has come your way.  In fact, you feel more and more that you have to invest some money on such softwares as search engine submissions, ezine cover designer, Google AdWords or other advertising activities.

You want to bring uniformity in all your web pages.  You copy the source code.   Add some new material and when you see the outcome, you find that something has gone wrong.  Everything has shifted to left or right or up or down.  In fact, you would be fortunate if you had saved separately the original code.  Now you start tinkering with the code.  By the time you have fixed everything, it is already early morning!

You have to do all this.  You have to do all this in your spare time, late in the night.  Some such sort of things I had been doing all these days to revive the website.  It is still not perfect but I am too not finished with it.

The only solace for you is hope of success.  The good thing about all this is the more you do it the more you get interested in it.  It seems that you are really not doing it for money.  You are doing it for pleasure, for testing yourself, and for success.  You no longer get tired doing it.  You rather enjoy it.  You look forward to it.  That is the best work.  It has become sort of worship. 

Below is the life history of one of the greatest ‘failures’ of the world:

1. Age: 21 years            :Failure in business.
2. Age: 22 years            :Failure in elections.
3. Age: 24 years            :Failure in business.
4. Age: 26 years            :Death of wife.
5. Age: 27 years            :Nervous breakdown.
6. Age: 34 years            :Defeat in Congress elections.
7. Age: 45 years            :Defeat in Senate elctions.
8. Age: 47 years            :Defeat in attempt to become Vice-President.

Who was this man?

Abraham Lincoln who became President of America at the age of 52.

Persist dear friends and you will be successful.  Never, dream of overnight success.   There is no such thing.

BE SUCCESSFUL!