Keep on keeping on
It’s a long season! You can’t win the Super Bowl after Week 1.
Yet, that’s the thing people are expecting when they start anything.
It’s a long season! You can’t win the Super Bowl after Week 1.
Yet, that’s the thing people are expecting when they start anything.
Our identity is going to change well before people take notice.
And that’s why we get strange looks and odd questions.
One day we are one thing to someone and then randomly, almost like it’s out of the blue, we become something different.
You won’t become great by learning a skill.
You become great by building an ecosystem that supports that skill.
It can apply to all facets of life.
The magic happens behind the scenes.
When we see a cool video, listen to a podcast, watch a movie, or read an interesting novel, 99.9% of it was created without an audience.
To get where we want to go we have to put in the work we never have.
If we wake up every day trying to do our best the hard work pays off eventually. We never know when it’s going to click
Nothing that is going to be worth it, in the long run, will be easy to start today.
So if you’re wondering if should you do it or not, the answer is an emphatic YES!
Play the entire game and add it all up at the end.
This is a mantra we’d all stand to benefit from.
Too often when we think we are “behind” it knocks us off our balance and bruises our ego. We throw our hands up and say, “What’s the point? I’ll never win.”
What is “winning” anyway?
I used to be the “I’ll get started on Monday” type.
I became the “just get started now” type.
That single mindset shift changed my life.
I promise it’ll change yours, too.
What was the 2013 version of ourselves doing back then?
What do you think the 2033 version will be doing?
We’ve come so far.
Imagine what some focused effort and decision-making can do for us over these next 10 years.
20 years into the future, our 2013 version will come to be unrecognizable.
There is no timeline.
Stop beating yourself up if you haven’t:
Gotten traction yet
Gotten that promotion/raise
Met that significant other
Found your purpose
Figured it all out
Often times it’s not a big change that has to be made.
It’s a tweak.
A slight pivot.
A minor movement forward.
One more turn of the wrench.
This New Year let’s not say “New Year, New Me” because change doesn’t happen like that.
Change happens by moving intentionally and incrementally forward.
It’s building one good habit after another.
Take a seed out of any food we are eating and place it on the table.
Don’t do anything to it and let it sit there for a few weeks.
Do you know what happens?
Almost nothing.
Consistency is the worst kept secret of accomplishing anything important to us.
We must start. Not once but each and every day.
More than motivation it’s an action.
I’m starting to question if the fear of starting is partly that we don’t want the responsibility of what could happen if we actually succeed.
Comfort is the warm blanket over us as we hit the snooze alarm. Getting up and doing something actually creates a whole new set of unknowns.
Best to stay tucked in for a bit longer, I guess, so we don’t have to deal with the discomfort of waking up.
I enjoyed writing for many years and would normally write in journals or random blog articles from time to time. The content structure and topics changed over time but similar messaging was at its core.
Positive Mindset. Consistency. Action. Progress.
We actually don’t need to make monumental big changes. That’s a common misconception.
It’s the small changes that matter. The ones that are incremental and barely even scratch the surface. The ones that almost no one would notice if they looked at us or our work.
We live in a world where we are told that quicker is better. Faster, faster, faster.
Fast food
The “hot” take
Crash dieting
Hyper growth
Someone is going to catch us if we slow down. Keep pressing down the accelerator.
We must be thoughtful about where we want to go as that will help plot the next few steps down the path. The direction is much more important than the speed at which we arrive.
If we’re not getting the results we want we could consider a few things:
It’s too early, we haven’t given ourselves enough time
We’re wrong – what we thought would work wasn’t correct and it’s time to pivot
We’re asking the wrong people – Audit your group that is sharing advice
We’re not talking to the right audience – We might have something magical but it’s not the right group of people who would benefit from it.
Why does a Monarch butterfly do the things it does?
Here is a caterpillar, crawling around the earth and living just fine. Then, for reasons we can’t possibly fully know, it decides to create a cocoon and after a short isolation period, boom, it now has wings.
Progress happens over time and is rarely seen in a moment or even a series of days. It’s a continual flow of work that creates the life that we want.
Sure, an intense workout or an unbelievable date, or an incredibly productive day is needed from time to time. Those have to be a part of the equation.
What did we learn this year?
One year older or one year wiser? Maybe both.
Age, they say, is how we feel. So how do we feel today? Turning the page on another calendar year. How did the last year go?
When we are running up a hill into headwinds the initial thought might be to zig-zag back and forth to avoid hitting the wind head-on and to help level out the steepness of the hill as much as possible.
But the focus on the climb straight upward, even through the toughest conditions, will create the energy you need to get through it. “Avoiding it” may seem like a more ideal strategy but you can expel just as much energy and not nearly get as far. The headwinds can still push you back off-course. Life is going to be hard either way.
Growing up, when we’d have limited numbers of players for baseball, we’d put a “ghostie” on base to act as a runner.
That same mentality can be used when we are trying to push ourselves harder and farther than we ever have before. We are competing against ourselves. Against a person who we know really well. We know their weaknesses, their shortcomings, their fears.
We can often get discouraged if we compare ourselves to what others are doing. It’s easy with the access we have to social networks. We get a glimpse of how everyone else appears to be prospering while we are paddling like hell in a circle.