At
some stage in your life, you still dared to dream and you had those grandiose
goals and aspirations, to live a life of meaning and fulfilment. What killed
that drive and determination in you? Was it because you really were dreaming
the impossible or you just simply did
not have what it took or was it something else altogether? Was it because the
people around you told you that what you wanted to achieve in your life or
business was impossible? Eventually, after hearing that negative talk from
everyone around you, you started to believe them and so you simply gave up on
your dream for your life or business.
There
is only one opinion that matters when it comes to following your heart and
living your dreams. The opinions of everyone around you are nothing more than
feedback from your environment. As you know feedback can be very useful to ensure
that you have considered all the possible challenges, or to help you assess any
knowledge or skills, you may require. It is seldom a reason to kill your dreams
and to accept an average life, with no meaning or fulfilment.
As
you know, if you have ever tried to light a campfire. Nothing will happen until
that small spark hits the kindling. Those small flames, which start to flare
up, in the kindling, will very quickly die out, if you do not add more of the
right type of dry wood to the fire, to help build the fire and add critical
mass to it. If you add huge pieces of wet wood with the bark still on it, the
small fire you have created with the kindling, will be unable to ignite the big
piece of wood and the small fire will quickly die out. The same is true with any new idea or dream
you may have, for your life or business. When that idea catches fire in your
belly, it is important that you take action immediately, you must then keep
adding the right amount daily activity, to this small flame of inspiration, to help
keep the idea alive and to eventually to bring your idea to life.
Take
the Right Type of action
If
you do nothing and you do not take any action at all, those initial flames will
obviously just die out. If on the other hand you rush headlong into attempting
to turn your idea into reality, as soon as possible. You will also kill those
flames of inspiration, as you will feel overwhelmed and quickly move back to
your comfort zone. The simplest example I can offer here is one where someone,
gets all inspired to get fit. So they sign up for a new gym contract. They rush
into the gym and for the first three days, they go every day for an hour of
vigorous exercise. As you know we are a pleasure seeking and pain avoiding
species, so as the level of discomfort increases as we overload our bodies. We
quickly lose interest and return to our comfort zone and almost immediately
stop exercising altogether.
If
that person had thought the process through and instead of rushing headlong into
the gym, every day, they had instead, started slowly. Doing the right type of exercise,
which was fun and enjoyable. Not overtaxing themselves, they would have been
far more likely to keep going to the gym and their new exercise routine would
have eventually become part of the daily routine. If we use this approach, to
achieve any goal we want in our life or business, where we quickly take the
right action, which helps to keep the flame of inspiration burning, and we keep
adding the right activities to our initial action. We will gradually build up
the critical mass we need to sustain our efforts and eventually achieve our
goal.
Sustaining
the Effort
The
second challenge we have when we have a new idea, is to sustain the initial
effort required, to get the idea going, when we do not see any immediate
results. Imagine a hand water pump, with the water level about 3 meters below
the ground. When you prime the pump (add a little water to fill the pump) and
you begin pressing the handle, up and down. You will see no water come out of
the spout, for quite a long time, as the water is slowly pumped from far
beneath the ground and it gradually rises to towards the surface. If you stop
pumping before the water gets to the surface, it will simply just return to the
level it was at, before you started pumping.
This
is how most people tackle any new goal, they start out taking action every day
and as they do not see any progress for a while. They stop taking action,
before the actions they are taking have had time to gather momentum and so they
never get to see the results they desire. In the example of the water pump
above, if the person pushing the lever on the hand pump, kept pushing the lever
long enough, to give the water a chance to start flowing from the spout. It
would take very little effort to keep the water flowing. The same is true for
achieving your goals or turning ideas into something tangible and real. You
need to persevere and keep taking those small actions every day until you see
results. Once the results start to appear, it is really easy to sustain the
effort required.
Imagine
a huge horizontal flywheel, rotating on a vertical shaft. If you grabbed hold
of it and applied force to start the flywheel turning. You would only manage to
move the wheel a fraction. As you continue to apply force to the flywheel it
will slowly, build up momentum, until it is spinning at speed. It is not the
first push or any one push, no matter how big that push may have been, which
allowed that flywheel to build up the speed and momentum it now has. It was the
accumulation of all the small pushes, which added up to make it speed along. Exactly
the same is true for the almost insignificant goal specific actions you will
take every. No single small action is going to result in the success you want.
It is the accumulation of all those almost insignificant actions, over time,
when added together will allow you to succeed.
Achieving
sustainable success is thus the result of taking action, before the idea has
had a chance to fizzle out, to then keep taking small actions daily, to sustain
this flame of inspiration and to use your willpower to sustain these efforts
long enough to actually start seeing results. The biggest secret of all is to
accept that goals are not achieved in a day, but rather daily, with sustained
and determined effort.
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