The only reason some people enjoy success while others fail is because those who succeed persist in holding the vision of what they want.
They succeed, in the first place, by creating a vision.
Then they persist in that vision. As it sinks deeper into their minds, it becomes a driving obsession. It becomes their most cherished value. And they spend all their time in trying to materialize that value. This drives them to training themselves to achieve their goal.
Most people believe that success is a result of a realized talent. Talent is what people see. They see a bewildering array of skills and concludeincorrectlythat the talent made the person brilliant. Others attribute it to motivation. Again, this is the effect, not the cause that arises from a vision.
I contend that talent is cultivated from vision, and that as vision deepens, as action toward learning and implementation proceeds, skills develop and accumulate. The end result of numerous small skills is a prowess or flair for doing something that we call talent. Personal development happens incrementally, in small quotas, in chunks.
How did Albert Einstein become the greatest thinker the world has ever known? What is the wisdom we can gather from looking at his success story? How did a patent office clerk achieve success as a celebrity? The simple answer is that he was a genius. He had more brain cells. He had more ability to think.
Yet a history of young Albert Einstein showed that he was not a brilliant student. In fact, his teacher once sent a note to his parents suggesting that he was wasting time attending school.
And as for geniusthere have been many, many talented, brilliant physicists and mathematicians.
What Albert Einstein had was a vision. He was driven by an indefatigable curiosity about the nature of the universe. When he was 16, he imagined what it might be like to ride the waves of a light beam.
From this vision, Albert Einstein developed powerful inroads into his ability to envision things in his mind’s eye. His thought-experiments deepened in clarity and precision over many years. They reached such intensity that they accumulated into insights that answered in a most unorthodox way the riddles of physics.
Later, when he died, it was found that he had an enormous preponderance of brain cells that most normal people did not possess.
It is my contention that just as a muscle that is constantly exercised, his brain developed extraordinary connections and fusions over a lifetime of intense usage.
Albert Einstein became a genius because he held a vision. His skills at right-brain cognition developed over many years created such a preponderance of insights that he just had to discover how the universe glued together.
In a similar way, every one of us can develop remarkable capacity in any field if we just hold the vision long enough, shun distraction, and persist in our ideal despite everything that comes our way to throw us off our chosen path.
The journey to accumulate a thousand skills begins with developing the first one. Progress comes from sustainability of vision.
You can be what you want to be if you hold it long enough and ferociously enough to overcome all obstacles. And, in the end, what you will gain will be exponentially greater than the sum of all your efforts. It, in fact, be a true quantum leap.
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Saleem Rana got his masters in psychotherapy from California Lutheran University, Thousand Oaks, Ca., 15 years ago and now resides in Denver, Colorado. His articles on the internet have inspired over ten thousand people from around the world. Discover how to create a remarkable life
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Cat’s song starts with this stanza of lyrics.
Now that I’ve lost everything to you,
you say you want to start something new,
and it’s breaking my heart you’re leaving,
baby I’m grieving.
My wife left with our CDs and with my child and with my heart. When she told me to leave her or else she would move out, I cried my heart out for a while and then politely asked her if I could sleep in our bed with her that night and possibly leave in the morning. She agreed that I could and didn’t change her habit of sleeping nude and I slept next to my sexy wife naked next to me for the last night. Just as we were going to bed that night, half an hour after the argument that ended in me being given myo marching orders, I was tempted to ask her if I could make love to her one more time before I left. You know, “One for the road.” lol
It wasn’t fear that stopped me from asking, it was my respect for my wife as asking her to have sex so soon after a bad argument and considering that she had finally had just to much of me would have been highly insulting to her as there would have been no love coming from her side.
I have always been a person who likes to spend money and my wife liked doing it, and so besides some nice clothes and a TV and sterio we really didn’t have anything of value except our collection of CDs of which I left her.
I left in tears at 5am in the morning, looked in on my 2 year old son and was tempted to take him away with me on a train to my parents, some 500kms away. Yes I could have taken my son, as I was his father and the police could not have arrested me and taken him back. I could have settled in my home town and the fight for custody could have started 10 hours later when Sharryn would have been angrily shouting at me at my parent’s house over the phone.
But taking my son would hurt Sharryn and though she had told me to leave, I was not going to hurt her in that way. Besides, let’s face it, mothers are made to nurture children, and children are best raised with a mother if it is possible. Fathers are good at parenting and I have met fine fathers in my time, but God made breasts on a women and it kinda proves the babies are meant to be closer to mum.
So leaving Sharryn that morning was kinda leaving my heart in that house in her spirit and part of my heart broke leaving my little boy also. Some people might assume that a male does not weep when he goes from a 14 day a fortnight full time father to a 2 day a fortnight part time father, but ladies to a sensitive co dependent messed up guy like me, losing the full time relationship with my son made me very sad.
For 8 hours on the train to my parents’ house I wept. The trees and meadows and farms passed by outside, with splashes of green and brown and the odd blue river under a bridge, and inside I wept as quietly as I could so as not disturb anyone. Six days later in a shower I decided to kill myself and if it had not been for my spiritually in tune mother who worried about her son in that shower that day, and my younger brother who was a trained counsellor, I would not have been typing this.
and it’s breaking my heart you’re leaving,
baby I’m grieving.
Though I left, it was my wife leaving and boy, suicide was very close.
But if you wanna leave take good care,
hope you have a lot of nice things to wear,
but then a lot of nice things turn bad out there.
Though I had not been a good provider in the months before the separation, I had been good for the years before, and my wife had some nice outfits to wear. I have to agree with this lyric though, my wife was really pretty in my opinion with her rich Lebanese olive skin and dress size 12 figure and dark hair it would have been my wish to see her in more stunning dresses.
Sharryn was a dream girl. Such a wild girl, like a good horse she had plenty of spirit, enough to make her win races if she was a race horse and the endurance of a good horse that might do country riding. She was a fighter, she was a Maverick out of Top Gun, her all-time favourite movie. She was a player, she was the right girl to have at your side if you were going to take big risks and go all out at building a big empire. She wouldn’t fight to be the man of the house, she was strong enough to stand by her man and hold him up and pull him back up if he has a setback, but she was so strong in spirit that she was the wife a future millionaire would choose in his youth and together they would set the world on fire.
She had stickability, she was loyal, she was a vixen in bed, very loving and very intoxicating like a drug to me. Her looks were something that just kept me looking in the mirror each day and wondering why she fell in love with me. She used to say I was very handsome, but I had such a low opinion of myself I told her she was crazy on a number of occasions for marrying me.
I think I said it so much I convinced her!! lol
She was a gem. Her real father was a multi millionaire on good property who did endurance races on Arabian horses over five days and hundreds of miles for fun, who had a business and bred champion horses on his own stud at home as a side income. I only met him once, he offered to teach Sharryn and myself to ride endurance with him and his new wife. They say a girl marries her father and I could not reconcile why she married me.
Then when she told me about her step father who molested her, a drinker and a loser, though I have never been a child molester, I seemed a little bit more like this loser her mother had in her second marriage. This man had also left her life as mum had moved on.
Today I am becoming a lot more like her millionaire father and a lot less like her step father and in the midst of my counselling I reminisce and wish that she could have just held on long enough to see me now. She’d be proud of how well I am going and my love for myself.
but then a lot of nice things turn bad out there.
Things didn’t turn out bad for Sharryn. She left me for another bloke she was having an affair with. Well I was not good enough and she would have told me to leave even if she didn’t have another lover. I don’t blame him at all. I can’t blame him for sleeping with my wife behind my back. She had told him it was alright and perhaps she was just trying to get the courage to leave me.
She invited him to a drive-in movie with us one night. He was her friend she met at work where she was working, it was a vegetarian sort of caf
There is a very interesting mystery surrounding the concept of “being happy” and the importance of accomplishment.
We all have things that we “desire.”
We all understand that if we accomplish desires that align with our values, we will be happy.
We all understand that to accomplish the steps to meet our desires, we have to take certain steps.
We all understand that these steps aren’t always that complicated. Oftentimes, it’s as simple as leaving work 15 minutes early to spend more time with a loved one; or choosing a salad instead of a cheeseburger to take care of ourselves physically.
Okay–so the above facts aren’t rocket science. So the question of the hour is this:
If we all understand these basic 4 principles. Why do we so often make a choice that doesn’t help us in any of them?
Why do we choose to berate ourselves instead of think positively? Why do we choose the cheeseburger? Why do we stay up too late so we are tired or grumpy the next day? Why do we stay at work too late? Why do we make a laundry load more important than one-on-one time with our child if we haven’t seen them all day? If we know getting up 10 minutes earlier to say “good morning” would be good for our mental health, why don’t we bother? Why do we get mad at a customer service person who has no part of the origin of our problem? Why do we spend so much time doing the things that don’t make us happy and don’t lead us anywhere?
Good questions, aren’t they?
Well, before I give you what I perceive to be the answer, I want you to join me in unraveling this mystery in your own life. Grab a notepad–you get to play detective this week. Each time you find yourself making a choice that weighs more on the negative side of the scale than the positive- STOP. Write down what is going on in your mind and what is going on around you. See if you notice any trends or connect any dots.
As always, actually doing this exercise will put you miles ahead of those who don’t.
Part Two
In order to truly understand this exercise, I need you to take a moment and think about the last 90 days of your life. Write down the times you were the happiest–and what caused them.
Most people end up with a list that contains things like this:
A heart-to-heart moment with a significant other
Time spent with a child
Laughing at a funny movie with a girlfriend
Taking some time and learning something new about myself
Experiencing a spiritual connection
Most people do not end up with these things on their list:
Working late at the office
Almost getting to my next promotion
Buying that new car
Cleaning the lint out of the grate below my fridge
Spending $1000 on the perfect outfit
So here is why it is important to look at these things. Most of the actions we take, and the decisions we make, move us toward the second list. These are items we “think” will make us happy. Why? There are many reasons from marketing to commercialization that could fill a book.
In summary, we have internalized that true happiness–because it would be so wonderful–must require we move mountains. In reality, true happiness only requires we sit on the mountain and look around and truly see. Instead of looking for happiness tomorrow - we grab the “moment of today” and live our happiness now.
So we live in this paradox–we run around trying to do all the things we think will make us happy, and while we do this, we lose all the chances to engage in what truly makes us happy.
Add to this the quote we discussed on the message board this week, “You are what you repeatedly do.” This type of thinking becomes habitual and engrained and difficult to alter. We must be proactive, concentrated, and focused if we wish to change.
Using the 3 Step Daily Action List is one way to hone in on what does matter, and what will move us forward.
Affirmations, like those used in the Good Morning program (visit www.changeyourlifechallenge.com/news.htm) are another powerful tool in reprogramming our thinking.
Your Challenge for the Week:
Go on a happiness hunt. Observe your habits and your choices. Create your own moments that matter. Try to have at least 20 on your list by the end of the week.
The Change Your Life Challenge
http://www.changeyourlifechallenge.com
Take control of your home, finances, relationships, clutter, time-managmenet and more with this 70 Day Program. Sign up for the free Challenge Weekly Newsletter and the motivational daily Good Morning.