How Tragedy Can Motivate You to Succeed

We’ve all suffered hardships in life. Hard times can make us want to crawl into a hole and give up. There’s a different way to look at things. Tragedy can help us learn, motivate us to move forward, and lead to personal success.

It’s Not About Money or Fame

First, let’s get one thing clear, success is not about money or fame. It’s about accomplishing a specific goal or set of goals. This allows us much more freedom to define our own success, even in the wake of a tragedy in our lives.

If you’ve followed my writing, both here and at Hip Diggs, you know I’ve suffered a few blows in my own life. Here’s the shortlist:

  • Child victim of a cult, age 10-16.
  • Struggled with post-traumatic stress, age 20-30.
  • Partner had extreme OCD, age 36-44
  • Lost firstborn child to stillbirth, age 38
  • Went through divorce/custody battle, age 43-48
  • Diagnosed with a blood disorder, age 55

These are the major events. Along the way there have been a lot of day-to-day struggles as well. Still, I’ve always been able to find a way to turn tragedy into success.

Tragedy and the Power of the Pen

There is a simple way to turn your tragedy into a successful venture. This venture is both an art and a medicine. It’s the simple act of writing. Let’s look at four potential benefits of writing about your tragedies.

  1. It’s therapeutical: First, writing about your deepest fears and pain can be extremely therapeutical. When you write about your tragedy, you let your feelings out rather than keeping them bottled up. Most mental health professionals promote writing as a form of therapy.
  2. You can set and reach goals: If you’re going to write, you might as well set some goals. You could set a goal to journal daily. A few years ago, I chose to write a book as my goal in continuing to deal with the effects of my childhood in an extreme cult. The result was a published book, A Train Called Forgiveness.
  3. It can be helpful to others: When you write about your hardships, you’ll also find that you are more willing to talk about them. Sharing your story with others can be therapeutical to all parties involved. Just don’t overdo it.
  4. May lead to financial success: I haven’t had huge amounts of financial success with my writing and music. However, that doesn’t mean it’s not possible. Marketing and publicity is hard work, much harder than the actual creative process for me. But at some point I may make the right connections and my work could lead to financial independence.

There’s More Than Writing

Writing has always been my go-to method for turning tragedy into success. But there are other ways to make good out of bad.

You could start a non-profit organization or become a mentor. You could go back to school and become a specialist in the exact area in which you struggled. The options to use your tragedy as a motivator to succeed are boundless.

I encourage you to turn your problems into positives. Even if you’ve had trouble in the legal world, you can turn your story into something that will help others. And that my friends, is success.

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