Anyone who thinks sunshine is happiness has never danced in the rain

I am sure that each and every one of us has, at some point in his or her life, been visited by grief, tragedy, or tremendous loss, emotionally or materially. It may have been a serious illness or accident or death of a loved one, or we may have seen a business or professional career which has grown and prospered over many years, finally come to disaster.

To those who have suffered such a loss, their feelings are hard to describe adequately. There is a sense of utter despair, emptiness, and a numbing of the senses. It can become so intense that one actually questions the whole purpose and meaning of life. Many people are unable to come to terms with sudden catastrophic loss, and therefore, we often hear of someone being so overcome with grief that they have taken leave of their senses, they suffer prolonged and repeated bouts of deep depression, a complete change of personality.

In extreme cases, some victims of hardship lose all inclination for life at all and they commit suicide. I remember a Turkish proverb which says that the best teacher is a bad experience. We should know that during our lifetime, we must expect to be visited by success and failure, pleasure and pain, loss and gain. This is the inseparable duality of life. We cannot value anything without knowing its opposite. We must accept life as it comes, in the best of times and the worst of times, with equal grace and forbearance.

Let’s look at the words from an email that I received quite a while ago. It came as an unsolicited email and I don’t know who wrote it. But it’s worth sharing with you.

“One day, a small opening appeared in a cocoon; a man sat and watched for the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through that little hole.

Then, it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as if it had gotten as far as it could and could not go any further. So the man decided to help the butterfly: he took a pair of scissors and opened the cocoon. The butterfly then emerged easily. But it had a withered body; it was tiny and had shriveled wings.

The man continued to watch because he expected that, at any moment, the wings would open, enlarge and expand, to be able to support the butterfly’s body, and become firm. Neither happened! In fact the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a withered body and shriveled wings. It never was able to fly.

What the man, in his kindness and goodwill, did not understand that was the restricting cocoon and the struggle for the butterfly to get through the tiny opening, were nature’s way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings, so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved its freedom from the cocoon.”

Sometimes struggles are exactly what we need in our life. If we were allowed to go through our life without any obstacles it would cripple us. We would not be as strong as we could have been and never been able to fly.

Happiness lies for those who cry, those who hurt, those who have searched, and those who tried, for only they can grasp the meaning of life. Life is not what you expect. It's what you don't expect that makes life worth living.

My life is too busy! I'll never find time to write!

When is the last time you just sat and did nothing? Or watched a sunset in a quiet place? Or stopped and really listened to a piece of music?

Unfortunately, doing things like that is uncommon in our busy lives. In recent months, my life is dreadfully hectic. There are so many things I believe I ‘need’ or ‘have’ to do that I don’t take time to recharge myself and just stop occasionally.

But shouldn’t there be more to life than rushing around and doing things every second of the day? Being overly busy results in being tired and less creative, it keeps pumped up and without time to reduce the pressure. Business fills my mind and get overwhelmed and lose track of where I’m going as so caught up in the tasks at hand.

And all of that builds into stress. Sure, a bit of stress in our lives is healthy and keeps us to deadlines, but continuous stress is exhausting and unhealthy.

When we are stressed, we become focused on only a few aspects of our lives – whether it is finishing a project, earning more money or dealing with a difficult relationship. Being so focused makes it hard to see the wholeness of life, and this can also mean missed opportunities.

If your head is always down at the desk then you may not see the perfect answer walking past. And it is hard to be creative and find alternative solutions when you are stressed and focused.

Focusing too long and hard on one thing is likely to bring up negative feelings towards the issue and your life. Stepping back occasionally breaks that focus and has many benefits.

Would you ever drive your car for years without changing tires, giving it a service or an oil change? What about an animal such as a horse – would you ride it all day without giving it a rest?

Think about star athletes for a moment. They train hard for hours every day, pushing themselves to the limits. But their training programs ease off as they get closer to a major sports event, and on the final day they are likely to do something very light and easy, not a hard training session. Why? They are letting their bodies have a rest so they will be at their peak during the event they have worked towards.

So if cars, horses and athletes deserve a break from busyness and stress, don’t you?

If you take a few small breaks in your day, and it can be five minutes of looking at a garden or listening to music, you may be surprised at how much more you can actually fit into your day anyway. The break will refresh and energize you, making the following tasks easier.

Busyness is a symptom of modern living, but you can control it so that stress isn’t a constant part of your life. Remember that you deserve to enjoy your life, too.


P/s: To all my friends out there, I’m sorry that I forgot to reply your email/msg, your birthday, wedding, etc. Hope to see you someday!

Failure is the quintessence of success

All success is the result of failure. It takes repeated attempts to succeed before success is achieved. Just think how many times you tried to drive a car before you got the hang of it. Success, of course, is "better" than failure, but success is not possible without failure. The progress of civilization is the accumulation of myriad failures followed by small successes, with the successes incorporated into the intellectual capital of mankind. Those societies that encourage failure in that way also encourage success. A father who punishes his sons for their failed attempts discourages them from making new attempts. See what I mean?

In our culture, mistake-making is not allowed, or at least it's not admitted. Sharing best practices is popular these days, but what about sharing worst practices or lessons learned? Wouldn't this approach provide some essential learnings? With best practices sharing, you run the risk of squelching innovation and creative thinking. People think: "That's how it's supposed to be done, so why should I bother to look for new and better ways?" Worst practices sharing or lessons learned leaves the door open for generating new ideas, and it provides people with valuable information about what to avoid.

No amount of analysis can replace your confidence in yourself. When you’ve made a mistake, especially a visible one that impacts other people, it’s natural to question your ability to perform next time. But you must get past your doubts. The best you can do is study the past, practice for the situations you expect, and get back in the game. Your studying of the past should help broaden your perspective. You want to be aware of how many other smart, capable well meaning people have made similar mistakes to the one you made, and went on to even bigger mistakes, I mean successes, in the future.

One way to know you’ve reached a healthy place is your sense of humor. It might take a few days, but eventually you’ll see some comedy in what happened. When friends tell stories of their mistakes it makes you laugh, right? Well when you can laugh at your own mistakes you know you’ve accepted it and no longer judge yourself on the basis of one single event. Reaching this kind of perspective is very important in avoiding future mistakes. Humor loosens up your psychology and prevents you from obsessing about the past. It’s easy to make new mistakes by spending too much energy protecting against the previous ones. Remember the saying “a man fears the tiger that bit him last, instead of the tiger that will bite him next”.

So the most important lesson in all of mistake making is to trust that while mistakes are inevitable, if you can learn from the current one, you’ll also be able to learn from future ones. No matter when happens tomorrow you’ll be able to get value from it, and apply it to the day after that. Progress won’t be a straight line but if you keep learning you will have more successes than failures, and the mistakes you make along the way will help you get to where you want to go.