“Sometime in the future, will I ever get a chance to see myself the way the world does?
Gaurav Badola
Laden with stones and the corners ruffled out
My smile only helps me pretending who I’m not
Walking miles underneath the shadows of misery
Hoping for my world to fall apart, yet again
From hopelessness to success is a mountain I’m afraid to climb
Afraid of being hurt, and afraid to be broken apart
Sometimes I wonder what’s it like to walk in the sunlight
Is it a road filled with misery, or a road with a smile?”
You know what’s scary.
Being stuck in no man’s land.
Do you know what’s even scarier?
Being stuck in a world with expectations, expectations you’ll never be able to fulfill. Likewise the day you start believing that maybe they’re right after all, ‘I’m just not enough.’
With that realization comes the fear of being nobody. With no one to turn to, either we drown ourselves in knee-deep rumination, or better we start running away.
Running away does have its perks, though. For starters, it takes us away from reality. Quite a good thing, I think. Then to top it all, it takes us a good step towards anxiety and depression.
Then, the second phase, which I call “The Hell Who I’m” begins. Here the said person loses the will to do anything. Slowly but surely. Most of us lie in that zone. Hopelessness is just a random side-effect of that.
Hopelessness, anxiety, self-doubt, suicidal thoughts, everything stems from our need to be something we’re not. We feel wrong when we judge others, while at the same time, we continually judge and annihilate ourselves. But it just doesn’t stop there.
It starts creeping up more and more. Soon you start wrestling with your thoughts, which, in turn, fuel the anxiety even more. Every day becomes a struggle, and the will to move forward slowly dissipates away.
Then there’s this idea of success. I remember the 15-year-old me wanting to be famous among the girls (gosh, I loved his innocence). As a result, I used to be so nervous. The moment I used to open up my mouth, all hell would break loose (I sucked at conversations). So, I used to keep my mouth shut.
Inadvertently, I became the invisible kid. Someone who had no real value, in and out of school. I used to sit alone, go-out alone, laugh alone, and live without living.
The dreams I had, for most parts being yearned for, fame, love, all felt like a distant dream. However, there was something that stood by my side.
‘My Hopelessness, and my Inner Voice.’
The Idea about “Success”
If I google in Success, I get something like this:
“Success is the accomplishment of an aim or purpose.”
A quite all-round definition, I think. But there’s a flaw here.
According to this definition of success, most of us are failures. Well, I certainly am. I have no idea what I want to be, and though it stresses me sometimes, I’m generally quite okay with it. The reason being, success isn’t a one-size-fits-all phenomenon.
So then, why do people chase success? Simple answer, to get rich and be recognized. The correct answer, to fill a void within them. It’s a long road to quench validation, quite addictive in that regard.
But even after that, people do end up falling into depression. So why’s that? Isn’t success foolproof?
Success, in no way, can determine the quality of your inner life. It never can. Does it feel good? Of course, it does. That’s the whole reason why we’re so hell bent on being successful.
But it’ll never feel fulfilling. There will always be something missing.
It reminds me of what Ellen once said about success, “While I was doing stand-up, I thought I knew for sure that success meant getting everyone to like me. So I became whoever I thought people wanted me to be. I’d say yes when I wanted to say no, and I even wore a few dresses.”
And that brings me to the final point, if your end goal is to be liked by someone, you’ve already failed. You might succeed, but you’d have already lost.
Are you willing to pay the price?
Connecting Success and Happiness
So, what’s the sweet spot? What’s the place where I can be successful yet happy and at peace with myself?
Glad you asked.
Before we go even further, let me ask you once again, “what is your idea of success?” Now, whatever it is, throw it out, like miles away, just for a few moments. You can go back to your fantasy world later.
How to reach from hopelessness to success and a fulfilling one at that?
Now with all of the old notions behind us, remember the last time you were happy doing something. How did it felt like?
Liberating, I suppose. Or we could go down the actual road and say, it felt right. And for a moment, you forgot the unending miseries and problems you’re facing.
For me, it was books that provided me the escape from my torturous mind. It made me feel connected to myself somewhat.
That hopelessness slowly started to evaporate. It didn’t go completely, but there were moments where I felt at peace. And that was good.
Moreover, once someone starts coming out from hopelessness, they start seeking success. I did, and you know what it did, it made me depressed again. So I changed my path.
So, in my uncanny way, with the limited amount of human knowledge I have, I derived my own definition of success. It’s just four words, actually.
“To Each Their Own.” Let it sink in again.
Success and happiness can go hand-in-hand if one knows what they’re looking for? If your end goal is money, fame, a lavish lifestyle, sure go for it, but have no doubt in your heart. If it’s just living a simple life with peace of mind and love, there’s no wrong in it either. And if you don’t have anything concrete defined, it’s okay as well.
No one defines it except you. That is the most profound yet difficult thing to digest. That means, if you fail, it’s on you, and if you succeed, it’s on you as well.
With that said, I present to you four people who have really changed my views on life. If you have someone else who might have influenced you, mention them in the comments section below.
Connecting the Dots: The First Pillar
“If you ever get the chance to treat them the way they treated you, I hope you choose to walk away and do better.”
I came across her work when I started my journey of mindfulness. Well, to be more precise, it was when I was tired of destroying myself and needed directions.
Her journey from hopelessness to success was anything but easy. She struggled for acceptance in her teen years, encountering isolation, loneliness, and even sexual harassment. For years she felt unworthy of love, belonging, being understood, of being listened to.
“I was bullied for being too sensitive, for being too vulnerable, for being too honest, too kind. So I started building up walls. I started guarding myself.”
For years, she built her home in other people’s and defined her worth on how much those homes welcomed and loved her.
At the age of 13, she started writing on a journal given as a birthday present to her. Day after day, she would come back to her journal, and write about her day. Slowly her writing became about her dreams and hopes as well. Since it was a place of no-judgment, she kept coming back to it. It became her home.
Three years later, she went to Canada to visit her family during the summer holidays. Meanwhile, war broke out in Lebanon, her home town. So, she couldn’t go back home. She found herself lost in a new world. A world where everything was new for her. The scenery, the people, the language, everything was new here.
Feeling lost and betrayed by the innumerable dreams she had written in her journal. Dreams about a home and a place to come back to. And now she found herself in a new place with no sense of familiarity and acceptance.
In anger, she ripped her journal apart and stopped writing for the next 7 years.
She described those 7 years as feeling colorless. But she felt it was okay since it was easier to stay on the sidelines and not express herself, than putting herself out there and getting hurt.
After being assigned eight Libyan students on her first teaching assignment, also torn apart by war, she saw her own image in them. The same struggles, the same fears, the same uncertainty. To help them recover from the pain, she started writing for them. Little did she knew how her writing will lead her into a new world. Slowly her writing became about her own journey. And this led to the birth of her first Book, Mind Platter.
I’m talking about none other than the sensitive, vulnerable, and the amazing Najwa Zebian. Her first book gave voice to everyone who’s ever felt hopeless, lost, and broken.
After being heartbroken, she felt colorless and miserable again. But this time, she didn’t rip her journal apart. She dug deeper into her world and started pouring her pain into words. As a result ‘The Nectar Of Pain’ was born.
In her words, “If you build your home in someone else, the moment they walk away, that home walks away with them, and you’re left with nothing but pain.”
In 2019, her third book, The Sparks of Phoenix was released, which portrays her journey in healing from abuse.
You know what makes her an inspiration to the millions of people who follow her work on Instagram, Twitter, and other platforms.
The fact that her journey is relatable to many people out there. With her words, she’s given voices to so many people out there. She inspires people to be themselves, portraying herself as not some idol who’s out of their reach.
Next time you feel hopeless, remember this,
“These mountains that you are carrying, you were only supposed to climb.”
Finding Strength: The Second Pillar
“We live as if we know how everything will turn out. I certainly lived that way. But we don’t know anything. Really, we don’t. To think otherwise is at best arrogant and at worst foolish.”
What if I say that you have a choice in the way you respond to life? That, no matter where you are, you have a choice. A decision to rebuild again, or to further drown yourself in misery.
Only a few would ever gather enough courage to start again. It’s tough. The thought of putting yourself out again is downright scary.
But, here is someone who’ll prove every single of your doubts as mere fragments of your negative inner chatter.
Model, motivational speaker, clothing designer, and author. What does that tell me? Successful, but here’s the fun part (the real thing).
At the age of 19, she lost both of her legs due to bacterial meningitis. She remained in a coma for several days with a 2% chance of survival. In a span of 2 and a half months after being admitted to the hospital, she had lost her spleen, her kidneys, the hearing in her left ear, and both her legs below the knees. Now, read the above passage again.
Her journey from that day onward has been everything but easy. Even thinking about it makes it seem so painful. And she lived it, and not just lived it, she made it a point to love herself again.
After going through several bouts of depression, she challenged herself to move on with her life. Following some difficulties with her prosthetic legs, she felt discouraged. But this time, instead of losing hope, she started her search for the right pair of legs.
And that’s when she realized,
“Our borders and our obstacles can only do two things:
1. stop us in our tracks, or
2. force us to get creative.”
She is one of the top-ranked adaptive snowboarders in the world, having won the bronze medal in 2014 Paralympics, and silver in 2018 Paralympics. She has also won three back-to-back World cup gold medals in snowboard cross.
On top of that, she is also the co-founder of Adaptive Action Sports, which aims to help those with permanent disabilities to get involved in action sports.
If that weren’t enough, she was also the runner up in the 2014 edition of ABC’s Dancing With The Stars.
She’s none other than Amy Purdy.
At times, the future might look bleak. Remember, life may not be perfect, but it always gives us a choice. Will it be easy? Hell No, but that doesn’t matter. Moving forward does.
No matter how broke, how incomplete you might feel, remember you always have a choice. Let go of the idea of how your life should look like (I’m currently in this plane), and you’ll find your answer.
From hopelessness to success, Amy never lost her will and her desire to move forward. She kept on pushing ahead, no matter how tough it got.
Everything about her life reminds me of a warrior. Her battles, her victories, and the way she continues to move forward.
Here is the life-changing question she asked herself, and something I ask myself as well on a daily basis.
“If my life were a book, and I were the author, how would I want my story to go? That’s the question that changed my life forever.”
I hope it changes yours as well.
Overcoming Hopelessness: The Third Pillar
“The answers you’re searching has questions brimming with insanity and hopelessness.”
Gaurav Badola
From hopelessness to success lies a blurred line, invisible to the masses. But what’s funny is that the whole notion of success is based on some superhuman conquering the world, out of reach for an average person.
This person’s story will make you realize that it’s far from the truth.
Her journey was rejection after rejection, failure after failure, filled with trauma, and hopelessness.
In her Harvard Commencement Speech, she described herself as the biggest failure she ever knew. She said that failure, no matter how harsh, stripped away the inessentials and made her come face to face with herself. For her, it opened the doors to her freedom.
Let me tell you about her story.
At the age of 17, she was rejected from college.
At the age of 25, her mother passed away after a 10 year-long battle with Multiple Sclerosis. She described it as the most traumatizing event of her life. Within just a year, she had a miscarriage, and at 28, she got divorced. After all of these events, what little will-power she had left got drowned after she was diagnosed with clinical depression.
At the age of 29, she was a single mother who was jobless, living on welfare funds. She said she was as poor without being homeless.
At age 30, being drained after subsequent failures, setbacks, and tragedies, she wanted to commit suicide.
As you can see, she was in no way the ideal person anyone will ever inspire for. She was in fact, the opposite of the perfect success we all chase after.
But something changed after all that.
She realized she is free and had nothing to lose. She described her failure as,
“Failure was a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.
Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea.”
And then, rock bottom became the solid foundation on which she built her life. No one knew what life had in store for her. She had been working on a book for a long time.
She submitted her manuscript and got rejected by a dozen publishers.
At 31, she finally published her first book. Within five years, her novel broke the US and UK book sales records.
At age 35, she became the author of the year. At age 42, she sold 11 million copies of her book within 24 hours.
I guess you would’ve guessed it by now. She’s none other than J.K Rowling, the author of Harry Potter.
There’s nothing in life that’s more gruesome than hopelessness. Being called a failure is no fun either, but it’s important. We all fail, not in the same manner as someone else, but we all do.
In JK Rowling Words, “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.”
And that brings me to my first point, what success means to you. It’s not the pain of losing something that scares us, it’s the idea of what we might lose that scares us. Because once something is gone, we find enough strength to find our way again.
Never Staying Put: The Fourth Pillar
“Your past should be your anchor which moves you towards your dream. It should not become a prison and suck your life out.”
Gaurav Badola
Honestly, I’m amazed by the amount of nonsensical things we tell ourselves every day. That voice just keeps on ringing, doesn’t it? More so, when you have no clue where you are.
We all have faced hard times.
This man spent most of his childhood moving between homes in California and New Zealand. At the age of 14, his family was evicted.
“We were living in an efficiency that cost $120 a week. And then one day, We come home, and there’s a padlock on the door and an eviction notice. My mom starts bawling. She just started crying and breaking down. ‘Where are we going to live? What are we going to do?’”
Due to the financial conditions being so bad, he started going down a destructive path as a teenager. By the age of 16, he had been arrested multiple times.
Motivated by the hopelessness and misery still fresh in his mind, he started to train. Hard.
“It was about, ‘What can I control with these two hands?’ he said. The only thing I could do was train and build my body. The successful men I knew were men who built their bodies.”
With the guidance of his teacher, who invited him to play football, he started falling in love with the game. Things started to change for him, both inside as well as outside. His grades started to improve, and he was asked by colleges across the country to come play for them.
After high school, he accepted a scholarship to play football for The University of Miami. With the newfound motivation and belief, he started giving his all, with the hope of getting into the NFL one day. But, injuries after injuries didn’t allow him to play at his potential, sinking him into deeper bouts of depression.
After being hopeless with falling grades, and injuries, he dropped out in his freshman year. Eventually, his coach pushed him to join him back into college.
After finishing his years at Miami, he was put into the NFL draft and was not picked at all. In 1995, he joined the Calgary Stampeders in hopes of accomplishing his NFL dream. It looked like things were starting to work again for him.
But two months into the season, and he was cut from the team. He felt lost, alone, and hopeless. He described it as one of the toughest moments of his life.
With no hope, a box full of crushed dreams, and a mere $7(he had a 5, a 1, and a change), he wanted to go back and be alone. He had it enough.
After some time, his coach called him, asking him to return, the same coach who had cut him off the team. And at that moment, he realized he didn’t want to play football again. It’s like, all of a sudden, the facade broke apart.
He decided to get into the business of wrestling. His father responded by saying, “It’s the worst mistake you’ll ever make. You are ruining your career.”
But, in his heart he knew he wanted to try it out, so he gave his father the option of joining him or not. His father said yes.
His first match was a disaster, the crowd hated him and he was consistently boo-ed. Later that year, he tore his tendon and had to stop wrestling for the rest of the year. But his return was nothing but amazing.
After reaching the top of the wrestling career, reigning in 17 championships and sitting at the pinnacle of his wrestling career. He had finally succeeded in buying his parents a real home and owning a Rolex. One day he felt like he’d done everything he wanted in wrestling, and walked away.
Now, he set out his eyes in the acting Industry.
He kickstarted his career in 2001 in the ‘Mummy Returns.’ He set himself apart by being known as the relentlessly hard-working actor who never stopped moving forward. In 2015, he earned the distinction of being the top-grossing actor in Hollywood. He has a production house named Seven Bucks Production (based on his beginnings). In 2016, he became the world’s highest-paid actor. In 2017, he received his own well-deserved star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
He’s none other than Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
For him, his motivation to never giving up arose due to his adversities. As he said,
#1 remember where you came from (keep it in front of your mind)
#2 Tell your self you are never going back there
That 16-year-old guy would have never thought how the world will unfold for him. But that’s all of us. Most of us have no freaking clue what awaits us. And it’s okay.
From hopelessness to success, Dwayne never gave up, always searching for the right thing to do. It wasn’t that his journey was smooth or easy, it’s just that he was willing to put in the work for it.
Now, I’m not saying you have to work hard like him. But, you have to remember it’s okay if you don’t know what you want in life for now. Things eventually do work out. Remember your beginnings, your journey, and never stop believing in your truth. Put in the work, move forward, and trust yourself.
“It’s difficult when the world doesn’t believe in you. But, it’s a nightmare when you start losing your own belief in yourself.”
Gaurav Badola
Final Thoughts
You reached here. Kudos.
The world isn’t a wish-granting factory, but I believe that the universe always respects a hard hustle.
The journey from Hopelessness to Success is a hard one, but it’s a journey worth walking. No matter what you have been told throughout your lives, your struggles will lead you towards your happy place.
Define ‘YOUR’ success and go after it. There will be moments of hopelessness, failures, and setbacks, but keep your head up.
Be strong, kind, and never stop. NEVER.
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