If it were easy, everyone would do it and then it wouldn’t be so special.
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Time + Effort = Success! If no time is invested, success is a hope or a dream or merely accomplished by luck. If you have put in the time, success has a greater potential to be realized. If you put in the correct amount of effort during that time, success will happen. Effort over time is what brings the most out of our innate ability. If you go to a cemetery, you will see countless grave stones with two dates that are separated by a hyphen. The dates tend to garner more attention than the hyphen. The hyphen is the time between the dates. The hyphen is the time that the person spent on earth living their lives. Success isn't determined by the amount of time between those dates but the quality of the time depicted by the hyphen. If we put in the time and the effort, we need to believe that success will happen.
Grit defined ...
Noun: Courage and resolve; strength of character. Verb: Clench (the teeth), especially in order to keep one's resolve when faced with an unpleasant or painful duty. Resolve defined ... Noun: Firm determination to do something. Courage defined ... Noun: Strength in the face of pain or grief. Quitting defined ... Noun: To give up or resign; stop, cease and discontinue; to stop trying, struggling, or the like; accept or acknowledge defeat. Courage defined ... Noun: Strength in the face of pain or grief. Resolve defined ... Noun: Firm determination to do something. Grit defined ... Noun: Courage and resolve; strength of character. Verb: Clench (the teeth), especially in order to keep one's resolve when faced with an unpleasant or painful duty. We can't stop the rain! No matter how hard we may try, no matter how hard we may look at the sky, no matter how angry or bitter or frustrated we may get, we can't stop the rain! We can look at forecasts and refresh every five minutes but the rain will either come or not, regardless of our attention to it. There are things in life that we have control over and there are things we don't. We can't stop the rain but we can wear a rain jacket. We can hold an umbrella. We can wear rain boots and two pairs of socks. We can avoid going outside or even close the blinds. We can also see the rain as a necessity to water the grass that makes it green or fill the aquifers so we have water to drink. We may not be able to change the weather forecast but we can change our attitude. We need to understand what areas of life we can control (our attitude is a primary one) and control those things. We then need to identify the things that we have no control over (like the weather) and choose to pray about it to someone who has control.
Control what you can control and Pray about the rest!
"Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail" is attributed to Alan Lakein who may have taken his quote from Benjamin Franklin who said, "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail". The idea behind both are true. Many people do not have the skill or ability to think ahead of today and are not able to envision what the future may look like. They are often overwhelmed and consumed with the present. There are others who fail to see the benefit and therefore lack the motivation to sacrifice a little time now to plan ahead in order to save a lot of time later. The benefit of planning does not offset the cost of time to plan for these people. And then there are those who lack the drive and perseverance to achieve anything worth their time to create a plan. This group of people is growing in our society. More and more people fail to have retirement plans or child college funds or career paths or other goals that require long term plans to achieve. All three people will suffer more and struggle often and achieve less success than those who learn to plan, take time to plan and set worthy goals that require a plan to be successful.
Why is it that we occasionally perform our best the first time we attempt an activity but then we are never able to achieve that standard again? It is counter-intuitive to how we have been taught our entire life. We have always been told that "practice makes perfect" or "work on your skills and you will get better over time". Our entire educational system is based on the concept that the more we do something, the better we will get at it. Then why do we sometimes get worse the more we do something? The answer is typically "expectations". When we do something for the first time, we go into it with little expectation and our brain is free to allow our body to do what it is capable of doing. Unfortunately, as we work on the skill associated with the task, we begin to form expectations and that inhibits our physical abilities. We are usually more capable after time but our expectations inhibit our performance. That is why the "clean slate" mentality is beneficial. A "clean slate" is a state in which you are starting an activity or process again, not considering what has happened in the past at all. When we do approach a task with this mindset, we soon see all of the things we have learned along the way from that first performance and it should bolster our confidence. Unfortunately, our memories are both short and long. They remember our failures no matter how long ago they happened but our memories forget all of the hard work and the accomplishments we have had in the recent past. We need to give ourselves permission to succeed and not focus on the ways that we should fail. Clean the slate!
Our goal in life should NOT be to achieve success by avoiding failure. Our goal in life SHOULD be to respond appropriately to failure so we can achieve the greatest success. We will always fail. Failure happens more than success. We will only succeed by learning and growing and adjusting our behavior and attitude to the many failures that we face and not cower away from difficulty or quit when we fail. Successful people don't fail less. They merely adjust better to failure and thus succeed more.
Bonus Feature: Easter is a great time to reflect on how we respond to failure. Specifically, how do we respond to those who fail us or who fail around us? We fail and God responds with Grace, by sending His only Son to die on a cross for us. Our friends, family, coworkers, teammates, colleagues, roommates, classmates, fellow human beings all fail us and fail around us. We even fail ourselves. How do we respond? Judgement? Satisfaction (ie - see, you aren't always right)? Anger? Disgust? Disappointment? Or do we show a small measure of grace? Tension refers to being "stretched tight". Obviously, when things are overly stretched, they may break and that could be bad. However, some things in our lives need to be stretched in order to allow room for growth or to grow themselves. Tension in life is not only inevitable in certain areas but necessary for growth to occur in other areas. We should not avoid tension in every aspect in life but instead we must recognize when tension is beneficial to us and then embrace the tension. Often times, life puts us in a situation where we are stretched and forced to respond to that tension and that is how we reach our full potential.
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AuthorCOACH. FATHER. HUSBAND. SON OF THE KING. WHITWORTH UNIVERSITY. Archives
April 2018
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