Life is a marathon, not a sprint; however, there are times — even in a marathon — when sprinting is required.
Most of us here in the 21st Century have very complex professional and personal lives. Our ancestors often went to work and did one thing at a set pace all day. Then they went home to enjoy their families only to go back to work and do the same thing the following day.
Homeostasis is used in biology to describe the tendency of a system towards equilibrium. When it is hot our body sweats. When is cold we shiver. But that force is not only biological. Believe it or not, there is a mental homeostasis that is at work on your mind. Your body and mind want to stay the way they are. It’s a physiological phenomenon.
Think about times when you are overflowing with confidence and motivation. We can agree that this is a good thing. But compared to the state your mind was in yesterday, this an abnormal state.
Are you like me and you want your dream to be manifested now?
Do you find yourself creating drama, struggle and doubt when your goals aren’t realized fast enough?
The Universal Truth about achievement is “Success is a Process”.
Period. Get that in your thick skull and receive it in your heart. The sooner you accept this truth, the more powerful you will be in your service to others, the more fun you will have, and ironically, the “quicker” you’ll attract results.
You often hear it said that people are afraid of change (no one likes change but a wet baby!), but that’s not true. People love change – as it comes with a guarantee that it’s going to be a positive change.
To prove this to yourself, imagine a change that entails a zero being added to the dollar figure on your paycheck, no strings attached. Most people dream of such changes! This is, of course, a hypothetical example.
People are not afraid of change per se – what they are afraid of is the uncertainty that goes with change. That is why so many people never venture very far from their own little box.
“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘press on’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” – Calvin Coolidge
I have worked with many successful people; people who have achieved the kinds of lives they have dreamed about. I have also worked with many people who are not anywhere near where they want to be in life. Many times those who are not successful resent those who are and believe that somehow success was handed to those who have achieved much.
Even if your body and mind are ready, willing, and able to learn and do whatever is necessary to get the job done, a negative self-image may stop you.
Although we create many outward images of ourselves-so we can interact with or impress others and sell our ideas or services-we only have one self-image. The way we view ourselves determines the level of success we attain in anything. To achieve more success, some parts of our sense of self will have to change.
One of the most frequent questions I’m asked focuses on the issue of confidence, self-esteem, and self worth.
When I was a child my father loved to take us for rides on Sunday afternoons. Rarely did we have any idea where we were going or might end up. As we wandered along the roads, back roads and even cow tracks near our town, we often found ourselves in strange places.
More than once we ended up on a road that ended in the middle of nowhere or that came to an abrupt end at a barbed wire fence. When that happened, my dad simply laughed, turned the car around and said, “Well, at least we know where we aren’t going.”
There are many ways to succeed on a short-term basis. If life were a three-day weekend, it wouldn’t be hard to know what to do, and it wouldn’t really matter any way. Life is a marathon and not a sprint.
Succeeding over the long-term is much different than becoming an overnight success. If you look behind the scenes of people who appear to be an overnight success, you will find that either their success came over many years and you weren’t aware of it until recently, or the overnight success is really not successful.
You probably have some positive changes you’d like to make in your life — in your career, relationships, or health and fitness. You know that if you make those changes you will be happier and more successful.
So why aren’t you already doing them?
Most of us have a pretty good idea of the steps we need to take to improve our lives. The real issue is overcoming inertia and taking the first step. Inertia tends to keep us in place, doing the same old things the same old way we’ve always done them.
Busywork has a bad rep. Keeping yourself (or someone else) busy doing meaningless or unnecessary tasks, simply for the sake of avoiding idleness, seems like a pointless waste of energy.
Only it turns out there is a point to it — recent research shows that keeping busy doing anything makes you a whole lot happier than you would have been doing nothing. Just sitting around, bored and inert, is a recipe for misery.
But if that’s true, why then do we so often choose idleness? Why do we do nothing, when we could almost always be doing something?