What Are You Being Qualified For?

Excerpt from The Prerequisites to Success: Pathways to Paramount Performance. Ch. 1

CHAPTER 1 — HARD TIMES

• Why? — Why is the most commonly asked question by those who know not. Why does this happen? Why me? What did I do? Oh God, why hast thou forsaken me? Even Jesus is not beyond such reasoning. I have learned through the trials and triumphs of life not to ask the question ‘why, but to ask the question ‘how? How is this going to change me? What did I not learn prior to this, and how is this going to make me more equipped to handle what is upcoming in my life?

These are the questions I ask, and by performing these small tweaks to your perspectives, that which naturally occurs in life is much easier to deal with. Hard times are a pre-requisite to success, that none can go without experiencing on the face of this planet. Many look at the rich, the happy, those ‘successful’ in life, whatever that looks like for you. People look at others living their definition of success, and they believe that because they have such and such, or since they are married to so and so, or because they have a Ph. D, they must not know what it’s like to endure hardship. I would beg to differ.

You know, the late great Bob Marley stated that, “every man thinks his burdens are the heaviest”1. I have found this to be true. People are only…