Good morning! I hope your day is starting off well.
Yesterday I worked from home. It’s a benefit that’s available in my job, one that I rarely take advantage of, but it’s nice to have the option. No traffic, dress any way I want, and lunch is only a few steps away. Besides, it gave me the option to cook breakfast for my little ones. That’s always a special treat for them. Times like this go by fast and you can never have them back.
I guess that’s what it feels like to be retired. Okay, aside from that part about going downstairs to the office to work all day. I know people who retired early, some in their thirties. That doesn’t mean they stopped working completely. Just that they stopped working at a job that requires their physical presence every day and found something that offered a little more freedom.
And make no mistake, these people are earning much more money than most of us will ever dream of, simply because they were willing to do something most people won’t. I’m sure they put up with their fair share of ridicule and doubt. I’m sure there were days when they wondered if all that extra work would ever pay off. But it did, and because of that, they have choices most of us will never have.
In yesterday’s post, I touched on two important premises. First, the notion that success occurs when our dreams become bigger than our excuses. Dreams give us something to work for, a goal to achieve. They make us get out of bed a little earlier and work a little later. Excuses are simply a free pass for not doing the things we need to do. Except they’re not really free – they end up costing a lot.
The second premise I touched on was the habit of success. This is something we’ve talked about before, and you’ll probably hear more about it over the coming year because somebody we all know is writing a book about it. It’s simply the idea that small successes, repeated over and over, build a mindset that can no longer see the potential for failure. It can only visualize success.
Thomas Edison tried hundreds of different designs before he developed a practical, working light bulb. Others were able to produce light, but only for a few seconds before the filament burned out. At some point, they all gave up. Instead of building the habit of success, they gave in to failure. Edison continued, and we all know how that turned out.
What drives a person to keep trying in the face of so many failed attempts? It’s simple. He didn’t see any of those early attempts as failures, because each time he learned a valuable lesson – he learned what doesn’t work. And if you keep eliminating all the different things that won’t work, you eventually reach a point where all that’s left is what WILL work.
Commitment is an absolute requirement in building the habit of success. You have to know, from the very start, that nothing will keep you from reaching your desired goals. That doesn’t mean nothing will go wrong, or that obstacles won’t stand in the way. It simply means you won’t allow those things to keep you from doing what you set out to do. You will succeed, no matter what.
Belief is another important factor. Would you set out on a trip across the country if you had no confidence in your ability to complete the trip? Probably not. The expectation of failure is enough to keep most of us from ever embarking on a new venture. And the stronger that expectation is, the less likely we are to even consider it.
But when success is the expected outcome, we’re not so reluctant to try. And the stronger our expectation of success, the more determined we become. We dodge the potholes, ease our way across speed bumps, and roadblocks simply put us on a different path that may prove to be more enjoyable than the one we’re on. The obstacles are the same. All that changes is our reaction to them.
And that reaction is driven by one thing – the expectation of success. When you succeed at everything you do, you expect to succeed at anything you do. Give that some time to sink in. It’s important. When you can look back at a track record of success, no matter how minor, you begin to expect success in everything you do.
We all have that track record of success. You learned to walk. You learned to talk. You learned to read and write and master the multiplication tables. Arriving at work on time is a success. Every job you complete during the day is a success. And the more we focus on those successes, the less we think about failure.
There is nothing you can’t accomplish if you commit yourself to a goal and believe in the outcome. Build the habit of success and nothing will ever stand in your way.
That’s all for now. Have an awesome day!
© 2019 Dave Glardon – All rights reserved
Dave Glardon 