When you learn to welcome challenges and love problem solving, disappointments will disappear. Enjoy the thrill of being a champion by relishing battles, whether you win or lose them. Whenever things go wrong, analyze the situation and see what you can learn and then move on. If you are constantly running into hurdles when pursuing a long-term goal, just remember there is no failure until you give up, so don't! Don't you love puzzles? Life is a maze (it is also amazing). Enjoy it! When you run into a dead end, just turn around and try again! Be an explorer, an adventurer. Take risks. Shoot for the stars! To do so is to experience an exhilaration that far exceeds the power of any disappointment that may come your way.
Abandon childish demands and foolish expectations. Are you looking for the perfect mate? If you are, you're sure to be disappointed. For only God is perfect. We mortals are imperfect. If you can accept that, you can eliminate much unnecessary misery from your life. The same is true for the perfect job, perfect child, or perfect life. It doesn't exist (unless we are among a handful of remarkable individuals who have enough clarity of mind, purity of heart, and understanding of life to see nothing but goodness).
Buddha and the bright side of disappointment
Let’s look at a concrete example from the life of Buddha Shakyamuni. After the Prince set off to begin his quest for enlightenment he spent several years living as a hardcore yogi. During these years the Buddha spent most of his time fasting and sitting in one place without moving.
One day, however, the Price realized that this extreme path was not going to bare any fruit and so he gave up that life in search of something more effective. He had spent years mastering a style of meditation that was not going to work.
Now most of us would view this as “wasted time”. We would curse the fact that we spent all those years and didn’t achieve anything. But the Prince moved on to new things. He knew that the time wasn’t wasted because without that work he would never have progressed to the next stage. Without it he would never have become the great man that has changed the lives of hundreds of millions throughout history.
Using disappointment to grow
We need to be more like the Buddha. We need to see disappointment as one step in a series of many that is leading to bigger and better things. If you choose to dwell on disappointment and curse the day that it happened you are going to get stuck. The wise use it as a catalyst for change.
