Good morning, and happy Hump Day! I hope your day is off to a nice start.
The week is half gone and the month is almost over. If you set goals for the week, today is the day you should be half done. If you set goals for the month and you’re only half done (raising my own hand on that one), you’re way behind. It’s crunch time. All those days of saying, “I need to get busy” have come home to roost. This is where we either start making excuses or making things happen.
We all know success happens a step at a time and, as long as you’re taking steps in the right direction, it’ll happen. The question is when. I can normally move across the building at work pretty quickly. If I have three minutes before a meeting, that’s enough time to visit the restroom. But when my back starts acting up and I’m moving like a snail, three minutes isn’t nearly enough.
It’s the same with the things I wanted to do this month. On the first day of the month, I had plenty of time to get everything done. A couple of weeks later I had half as much time. And here, with four days left in the month, I’m forced to acknowledge a cold, hard fact of life … if I keep moving at the pace I’ve been moving, there’s no way I’ll reach my goals. I guess it’s time to get busy, huh?
I think we all do that from time to time. We have an assignment, self-inflicted or not, and a set amount of time to get it done. Common sense tells us to just dig in and get it done. But other things are competing for our time, and we have to get them done first. Or maybe it’s just other things we’d rather do. The net effect is pretty much the same.
And by the time we finally get started on what we needed to do, time has just about run out. It’s possible to get it done, but at this point it would take a miracle. And believe me, that’s weighing on your mind the entire time. It’s hard to even get started when it feels like failure is the only possible outcome. Why can’t we have that same sense of optimism we had when we first set the goal?
Well, we can. We may not have that sense of having plenty of breathing room along the way, but that doesn’t mean we can’t reach our goal. Miracles do happen. Even more importantly, we don’t have to sit around and wait for the gods of success to drop a miracle in our path. We have the ability to influence these things. It’s just a matter of how badly we want it.
We’ve all heard stories of people performing amazing feats of superhuman strength in times of dire need. We’ve seen teams come back from a seemingly insurmountable deficit to win the game in the final seconds. And how quickly could you clean up the living room if the pastor unexpectedly pulled into your driveway?
When the need is greater than the odds, there’s not much we can’t accomplish. The trick is taking care of that need while the odds are still even a little bit in our favor. The later we wait to get started, the stronger the odds become. The need is still there – but if we let time keep slipping by, that need has to be even stronger to overcome the odds we’ve stacked against ourselves.
A sense of urgency can lead to some pretty impressive accomplishments. And even if it doesn’t lead us all the way to the finish line, it can show us a side of ourselves we’ve never seen before. It shows us what can be possible, what we can accomplish when we set our mind to it. Most of all, it shows us that we really do have what it takes. We just need to turn it up a notch.
Success isn’t always a linear climb. It would be nice if we’d always get started early and move steadily toward our goal. But when we find ourselves moving much too slowly (or not at all), we have to pull out the stops and create a miracle. All it takes is a sense of urgency and the determination to keep going, no matter what. And if you come up a little short, you’re still that much closer than you were.
That’s all for now. Have an awesome day!
© 2019 Dave Glardon – All rights reserved
Dave Glardon 