The Backlash against Underdogs

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Today I want to discuss a feeling, which recently held entry into my life. From time to time I´m still struggling with it, and I hope that this text might help others who feel similar about the topic.

Now as you might already know since last year, I am very much into self-development. Half a year ago that passion broadened into entrepreneurship.

If you´ve ever been interested in those two topics, you probably know that they are very much interlinked and that many successful entrepreneurs are into self-development.

The internet contains endless information about the different entrepreneur habits, mindsets and success stories.

I want to focus on a concept inside this niche that I stumbled over time and time again — the concept of Underdogs.

Now, as I already mentioned there is a variety of different underdog stories out there. Stories about successful people with a competitive disadvantage. Of people who had a painful past but worked hard enough to make it to the top eventually and now inspire millions of people.

Those stories are meant to inspire us, to motivate us to pursue our dreams. We keep thinking “If they can do it so can I! They had it much worse. I already have a head start so why shouldn’t I be able to do it?!”

I am sure everyone has had that thought at one point in their lives. I am no exception to that. And that´s precisely the positive reaction those stories should evoke.

But as I continued to hear about more underdog stories of the successful people I look up to, doubts started to creep into my mind. I realized that seemingly ALL successful people had had a difficult past. They all had to face hardships at one point in their life.

Let´s look at some examples:

• As a kid, Elon Musk had been severely bullied in school. He suffered beatings that left him with a jagged septum, and he even had to be hospitalized at one point.
• One of the most influential women of our time, Oprah, had been sexually abused at only nine years old. Throughout her childhood, she had been abused and beaten, which led to her acting out and getting herself pregnant at just 14 years-old. Her child died within two weeks after birth.
• J.K. Rowling, who gifted us one of the most incredible fictional universes that we have, struggled immensely before Harry Potter had its break-through. She was a broke, jobless single mom, who struggled with bouts of depression. Twelve of the major publishers all rejected her book, but she kept trying.

I am sure you know many more successful people, who had to overcome tough times in their lives.

In the last few months, I realized that even most of the somewhat successful YouTubers I follow have either struggled with anxiety, depression, an eating disorder, had been overweight, bullied, broke or even considered suicide at one point in their lives.

It came to a point when I started to feel like a tough past was mandatory for success in life.

Please don´t understand me wrong! Of course, I do not wish to have had their experiences in life. And I absolutely think that they deserve every ounce of success they worked so hard to achieve.

Still, it made me wonder.

I have never been bullied. I have never been over- or underweight. I´ve never been broke. I never had depression or anxiety. Overall I grew up in a loving family, had loyal friends and good grades in school. I have always been a happy person and enjoyed living life.

Of course, throughout the years I had to overcome a few difficulties but nothing you would call hardships ten years later.

So that raises the question:

Is success reserved to those who struggled hardest in life?

No, of course not.

If you search for them, you can find many successful people, who never faced such severe hardships.

Should you ever feel like your life has been too fortunate for you to be successful (it even sounds weird, doesn´t it?), search the internet for someone successful, who had a life similar to yours right now.

Trust me, on a planet full of 7.6 billion people there will be at least one person out there.

For me that means looking for law students turned into successful entrepreneurs. At this moment, my two inspirations are Mel Robbins and Lilia Kazakova from Lily Like.

And yes, those two have faced their own hardships along the way. But since they were law students like me, I feel like I am capable of doing what they did.

Another advice I can give you is to study your idols. Many successful people have published a biography in which they describe the hardships they faced throughout their life.

Read about it and learn!

Those people have traveled the arduous path and have learned valuable lessons that got them to where they are today. You don´t need to face those difficulties yourself. Internalize the lessons which took them years to learn.

Chances are you have faced some difficulties in your life that they never have and therefore you have made your own valuable lessons. Combine your lessons with those of your idols and you have a toolkid for success.

There is no single path to success and success is not reserved for one type of person. The only thing that counts is the effort you put in and the resilience you show.

So keep using these underdog stories for positive change in your life and never ever let them hold you back!