Negative thoughts lead to negative outcomes.
Fear, fearing failure for example, leads to holding yourself back, which ultimately leads to being close-lined by your fear, aka fail. Success seems to allude you at every turn for some reason, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t seem to break through. We lock ourselves inside of a (gerbil) maze of our making, unable to find the way out.
We stress about stress. Worry about worry. Every chance of us making a mistakes, lead us to being more and more indecisive.
Even expecting great things to happen can lead to ‘sudden’ disappointment, when they don’t happen, or when you get so close, but no cigar. It’s very rarely you can go into a movie with skyscraper size expectations of how perfect is and actually feel the same once the credits roll. The bigger the expectations, the harder they fall.
Like a gerbil wheel spinning around and around, bringing us back to exactly where we don’t want to be.
That said, it’s not that pursuing greatness is bad per se. Going after great things is an amazing goal to have. The problem is latching on to anything other than the pursuit — the journey — at the same time. The moment we expect something to happen, we lose sight of the present and dwell on the prize at the end of the rainbow.
It sounds like a mind-bender, but thinking a goal is inevitable, will make the goal unattainable. While you’re focused on what should happen, the work needed to make it happen is gathering dust in the corner.
Let It Go
In order to make any great thing happen, we have to let go of our expectations, let go of the prize, and focus on the next action we need to do that’s in front of us. If you expect a raise at work this year, but never get one, how are you going to motivate yourself to get over that awful disappointment? But if you have a goal for a raise, and then focus your entire work force on doing a incredible job at work, they’ll probably give you a raise and then sum just to keep you around. It all depends on what you are focusing on. Are you focusing on the carrot? Worried about the stick? Or pacing and bracing yourself to out run, out work, out create, out enthuse everyone else.
The goal is inevitable only when you focus less on the goal and more on the very next step you need to do to get closer to the goal. Each step, an impactful action. That’s the key to your maze.
STAY BOLD, Keep Pursuing,
— Josh Waggoner
