You used to win. You used to feel a step up. You always thought that success had to have an explanation, that it couldn’t be coincidence. Better genes, maybe a natural talent that only you had. Whatever it was, you felt special.

It never occurred to you that you were simply doing what you had to do for long enough to become good at what you were good at. So, one day you forgot the value of effort and ended up sleeping in the arms of this supposed superiority. It wouldn’t be long before they caught up with you.

Excuses were useful at first, but later the first “big” defeats would come and with them the necessary bath of humility that would help you understand soon after (and coinciding “coincidentally” with your departure from the nest), that you had only been one more one-eyed person in the land of the blind.

But that revelation was as necessary as it was unpleasant for you at the time. It allowed you to understand all those advices you despised when you were young, it made you feel ashamed when you remembered the pride you showed in some moments, and finally it made you wish to be better than the one you were.

You’ve learned a lot of things since then. Today you appreciate the value of hard work and you know that you cannot sleep in this world in which we live, because success is not about being born a superclass or anything like that, but about making the most of your abilities. It’s about effort and perseverance.

For no matter how much they want to sell us something else, there is no greater law than that of cause and effect, and everything - absolutely everything - that you have achieved in life for yourself came from the strict conscious or unconscious observation of that law. It is so, and you know it.

So, if in the past you achieved great things by doing what you had to do, now that things are no longer going your way, perhaps it is time to stop looking for excuses outside and start admitting that what is happening is that you must not be doing so well.

Don’t be sorry… just start doing it better NOW.

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