I am immensely pleased to extend a cordial welcome to all my readers. You might be reading this on your PC/Laptop practically sitting under a light bulb. But, have you ever thought it took more than 1000 attempts to make it. We all know that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. We also know the famous quote “I have not failed I have just founded 1000 ways that don’t work!” But do we really acknowledge the hard work by Mr Edison? I don’t think we do!
Allow me to take you on a reading voyage, to help you realize that there is “no success stories without hard work”.
Muniba Mazari
Let me start the journey by telling you about the Iron lady of Pakistan – Muniba Mazari. Married at the age of 18, and just after 2 years of marriage, she met with a car accident that left her entire lower body paralyzed.
Her husband abandoned her even though he slept while driving the car, broke her in pieces, and then she decided to divorce her husband. She successfully did it. But due to this decision; family tension grew; her parents divorced each other. Shattered through all this, she still tried to hold up the broken pieces of her life. And then the biggest bomb of agony dropped on her: Doctors told her she can never be a mom. But despite all of this, she rose like a phoenix from ashes.
She became the First Pakistani UN Goodwill Ambassador for UN Women. She has been featured under the 100 influential women of 2015 (BBC). She has been featured in Forbes 30 under 30. My conclusion over here is this: Earning titles, gaining people’s support and love comes with huge sacrifices. Every person who is standing on the stage has gone through the worst of the worst things, the things that you don’t even want your enemy to face! It’s just the veil that hides all the bad things in their life.
JK Rowling
Moving on, towards the next stop in our reading voyage. Well, she is the creator of one ‘Who must not be named’. Well if you didn’t get the hint, she is also the creator of ‘The boy who lived’. Yes, yes, we are talking about none other than our favourite J.K. Rowling, the creator of Harry Potter.
Allow me to share her story. While she was working on her first book, she ended up with a failed marriage and a baby daughter. With no job, no source of income, she went through the worst a mom can face; she was not even able to properly feed her baby girl. She had hit rock bottom. She struggled with depression, but she somehow continued to work. The book was her last hope. But, it seemed like god was still not completed with her and more hurdles were on her way. Her book got rejected by 12 publishers in a line. 12 publishers!
Hold your breath and think if 12 well-established people denigrated your work, what you would have felt? Devastated? Depressed? But she was still clinging on that hope, and the rest is history; that we all know!
Still not convinced by my examples that every great story has many hardships behind the veil; wait for the next stop in our reading voyage!
Starting with a question, what’s the best way to spend a summer afternoon? Well, my family prefers watching Mr Bean with chilly flavour popcorn. To be very open and blunt, I always thought about how easy his job is. And one day I accidentally dug a little bit deep in his story and find out how hard his life has been. In front of the veil, everything seems so happy, but behind it is the truth. The bare-naked truth. Bullied from a young age, called an ‘alien’ because of his face, outcast by society, this boy suffered from the beginning.
Agonized from a stuttering disability, he somehow managed to go to Oxford University for his graduation. But once again when he tried to move towards his passion for acting, the film industry abandoned him. Still, he built up courage and started working and ultimately in the end through hard labour, he brought a smile on hundreds of faces. Let me correct it, millions of faces including yours and mine.
I know we all are familiar with the stories of these great people, but I talked about them to help understand that it’s not a vanilla-story that made them what they are, but it’s the hardship behind it. The stories we all know, but the hardship we don’t, and my motto in this whole article was to make you realize how hard their life has been. With this, I am giving rest to my pen.