| "Every cloud has a silver lining" - PT Barnum The expression is saying there is good (silver the metal) in bad events. This sounds like hogwash especially when you're down. But if I look back on my life and all the bad events. There is usually something good that came from it. My first wife left me but I got married again and have a wonderful family as a result. Every job I was laid-off from always lead to a better job. If a girlfriend dumped me I got a better girlfriend. Many failures you have taught you valuable lessons about life. Getting fired from my first job made me a better worker on all subsequent jobs. There are even cases wherein retrospect had something gone bad, I would have wound up better in the long run. In the late 90's I started to buy and sell stocks, which I didn't realize at the time was gambling. So the first stock I bought was Yahoo, which was a popular search engine at the time. I bought 100 shares of the stock for $325 and it started to go down to $280 a share. My wife convinced me to hold onto it and I did. The stock eventually recovered and I sold it for $375 making a $5,000 profit. But after this, I lost 10x that amount, in the stock market, during the dot-com crash. Had I originally lost the money, I probably wouldn't have lost the bigger amount. An elderly parent might pass away but their suffering is relieved. People with horrendous experiences can make drastic changes that propel them to success. It's hard to even appreciate things without bad things happening first. You appreciate the good weather only because you experienced the bad weather. So remember that the clouds must be there for you to truly appreciate the nice weather. Think about the bad events in your life and how they've helped you in some way. |