Friday, March 19, 2010
One of My Favorite Quotes About Life
“Anyone who imagines bliss is normal is going to waste a lot of time running around and shouting that he has been robbed. The fact is that most putts don’t drop, most meat is tough, most children grow up to be just like people, most successful marriages require a high degree of mutual toleration and most jobs are more often dull than otherwise. Life is just like an old time rail journey… delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed. The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride." Gordon B. Hinckley
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
The Three Forgotten Secrets of Success
In our lives we limit our vision and therefore fail to discover the most powerful tools we have for success and they are how we choose to think, what we choose to learn, and how we choose to act! This lesson has been taught to me by some of the most difficult and challenging moments of my life. The first is when my Great Uncle Chad who had worked in the construction business in the long days of asbestos exposure was diagnosed with lung cancer. He was given six months to live as he degenerated quickly. He lived for a further eighteen months most of which was spent on a home hospital bed in his living room. I will never forget going to visit him right before he died. I told him how sorry I was he had to suffer so much and live so far beyond his diagnosis to just suffer more. He took my hand and calmly told me how thankful he was to have lived that long and how privileged he felt for the ability to suffer at the end of his life because he had learned so much from the suffering. Wow! I could not fathom what he meant. You mean we may not choose everything that happens to us in life yet we still have the freedom to choose what we do with our circumstances, what we learn from them and how we succeed in the midst of them? To me that statement was the summation of one of my Great Uncle Chad’s greatest successes in life. He could not overcome the cancer, indeed he died from it, but he chose not to let the cancer overcome him!
To be honest it wasn’t until a little later down the road I understood what he meant. My wife, Cortney, and I were surprised a little over two years ago with a curveball we had never expected. I was standing in a Macy’s store in Twin Falls, ID when my wife, who was pregnant at the time, called me to tell me that she had been to the doctor and something was wrong with our baby. That was the moment my whole world stood still. I remember driving home, fighting through tears and scared to death of what could happen. In the weeks to follow we went to many specialists most of which had never seen our son’s condition before. We soon came to realize how rare this condition was. In fact Joshua is one of only ten kids ever to be diagnosed with an aneurysm on his heart. The doctors told us eight of these kids died before birth, the ninth within two years of birth. Josh’s chances were slim and we would not know at any step of the journey what was going to happen. Talk about a defining moment. When you have to look the possible death of a child in the face against insurmountable odds and decide not to give up. This is a point at which we step into the darkness, we give up control. Before this experience I would have thought this would be the most limiting, hopeless and sure to fail experience in my life. Instead I found a freedom I had never experienced before. That at the moments of deepest fear, despair and possible failure in life we maintain our ability to choose what we do with our circumstances. We also gain the greatest ability to succeed because our vision, if we will lift our eyes from the moment, shows us things we have never seen before and never yet experienced. Now Joshua has been a miracle. He is two years old and has defied all the odds for everything. He has written his own story. We do not know how long he will be with us yet we have learned so much, we have chosen to rejoice in the journey and we have chosen to cherish each moment so that no matter what happens nothing can take from us the joy we have experienced from our little Joshua. That is true success that amidst the greatest challenges of life we can choose to experience joy, to succeed in the face of obstacles, to learn the lessons we would not otherwise learn and to go forward with faith regardless of the odds!
These principles may seem to be easier said than done. Like anything you will never know unless you have the courage to try them. To take a chance at believing and decide you will incorporate these timeless principles in your life and most importantly into your daily choices. Life in fact is simply the grand total of everything we choose. So first, let’s discover The Three Forgotten Secrets of Success:
1. We define ourselves by our choices.
2. There is NO point of arrival. It is all about the journey.
3. Practice does not make perfect, it teaches us what our best is and how to achieve it.
We define ourselves by our choices. We live in a world that says you are this way because of genetics, environment, etc. True there are things we may face and experience due to these factors. However, it is truly what we choose to do with these factors that will define who we are. It is not what life hands to us, we are not bound to act a certain way in every given circumstance. Just because something is human nature, a consequence of life we can’t control or anything else doesn’t mean we have to ever relinquish our ability to choose. The freedom to choose is the most liberating factor in helping us to achieve personal success. I have caught myself in the past saying, “I am not good with numbers so I am not analytical and cannot be good at that.” I learned to be analytical and apply the skills with numbers I never knew I had by jumping in, learning and actually applying analytics in business. I hear people say all the time, “I am just not good at that.” “I am not mechanically inclined.” “I don’t have that talent.” Whatever happened to believing we could learn and apply principles we may not have as second nature? We can apply these principles to us to become good at things we are not, learn things we don’t know and not give up before we begin. To begin indeed is the catalyst of successful thinking. We must choose to begin. To begin by not defining ourselves by rigid limitations that are not true. There are genetics, life circumstances, etc. that give limitations. I will not be a professional sports player. However, I choose whether or not that precludes my ability to be a good athlete, stay in shape, be an athletic coach, stay healthy due to an active lifestyle or to be a resource to my kids in helping them learn a sport they want to play. Wow! Look at how we just discovered in the midst of 1 limitation we had at least 5 possibilities! We choose to see the possibilities rather than the limitations. Nothing can ever take away our ability to choose to see, choose to act, choose to do and choose to achieve the possibilities which will exist no matter what life hands us! True it is we cannot be all things to all people. However, we can be many things. Within our sphere of talents and abilities our possibilities are endless.
One of the great, defining moments of my life happened in my younger years. As a child I was very shy. I had a tremendously difficult early childhood worrying about things going on around me and some very difficult experiences I went through. I turned inward, preferred playing by myself and became more disconnected from everyone else. My parents put me in preschool because they thought I was “antisocial” and would struggle in school. Those were the famous last words of my parents. I learned quickly that those having fun reached out to others, became involved and participated in many things. I was afraid and scared to death. Participating, talking to people, talking in front of people, etc. made my palms sweat, my stomach churn, etc. I began forcing myself to face it simply by doing what made me uncomfortable because I wanted to change. The desire to change is a beginning: a catalyst for something greater. We can then choose to act to re-enforce that desire regardless of the consequences we have to deal with. I cannot honestly identify the break through point yet somewhere in the midst of this pursuit I overcame my fear, the physical consequences were gone and I gained the ability to do something that before I could of said was an impossible limitation to overcome. Those who know me now with my excessive personality would wonder how it was possible I was ever a shy, self-conscious kid. People can change! I can now introduce myself and befriend perfect strangers. I can speak in front of huge crowds of people. This fundamental change to my personality has been crucial to success in everything I have done.
Even real limitations are not unconquerable when we see the possibilities and choose to go after them! One crucial principal in choosing to define who we are is to forget about what we cannot control and focus on what we can control! Too often we waste our lives, our time and thwart success by spending all our time worrying about or focusing on what we cannot control. It is expedient to set aside what we cannot control and go after what we can control in every moment we find ourselves in. One other thing to consider is what is actual verses what is perceived. Who said I was born shy? Really? Perhaps I became shy because of life’s factors and my choices involving them? Yet within myself was always the talent of reaching out to others and being outgoing. We may have dispositions and yet sometimes they are just a smoke screen to keep us from discovering our greatest talents. After all on the spectrum of strengths and weaknesses often our greatest weaknesses are just the opposite of our greatest strengths. That is indeed the reason we are given talents or strengths so we can use them to overcome our opportunities and weaknesses! Sometimes it is like having all of the weapons and losing the war because we simply do not choose to use them. How weak does the muscle that is never used become? Indeed, the greatest strength that that muscle achieves is when it faces resistance. What builds that muscle stronger and able to apply greater strength in the future is the amount of opposition, break down and building it experiences to become strong. That is why I love change! It causes us to challenge our comfort zone, get out of it and experience things we otherwise would not have chosen to experience no matter how difficult it is at the same time.
Nelson Mandela, a man who struggled through persecution to lead South Africa through apartheid and bitter racism faced an insurmountable challenge. After years of obstacles, defeats and what seemed as certain failure he said these words as the President of South Africa in his 1994 Inaugural Address (quoting Marianne Williamson, Return to Love), “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in all of us. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” (Williamson, 1992). Never forget that life may give and life may take yet we have the ability to choose to define ourselves, to see the possibilities, to focus on what we can control and forget about what we cannot. To succeed we truly hold the choice in our hands as to whether or not we will. Will you challenge your current thinking and choose to define yourself as able to choose who you want to become and what you want to do? Neal A. Maxwell said it this way, “Of course our genes, circumstances, and environments matter very much, and they shape us significantly. Yet there remains an inner zone in which we are sovereign, unless we abdicate. In this zone lies the essence of our individuality and our personal accountability.” (Maxwell, 26).
We define ourselves by our choices. We have the ability to succeed. The question is will we choose to? Ralph Waldo Emerson provided our hope in this statement, “That which we persist in doing becomes easier to us; not that the nature of the thing has changed, but our ability to do has increased.” (Emerson, 1). One of my favorite statements is: “It is not about me!” Think of all the learning, resources, other people, teams, etc. that we have access to in order to succeed! Our only mistake would be choosing to limit ourselves and give up on success.
There is NO point of arrival. It is all about the journey. So many of us are deceived by our false perception of the American Dream, or universally put the Dream of Humanity: to succeed and find happiness in life. Success whether material or anything else does not come from the lie that you can get something for nothing. Work is required and real labor with long-term perseverance alone produces results. Many people have a fleeting feeling daily that they are missing something in their lives. They reach for passion, fulfillment and the realization of their dreams. We always stretch for a future moment of arrival as if it was a static place of existence. This is the place where all of our dreams come true, when we receive all that we have suffered for, when all of our choices in our allusion finally mean something. The reality is that there is NO point of arrival. Life is not about arriving, it is about the journey. You never get to check into a perpetual resort where life stops and you become all that you wanted, experience everything you wanted and have all that you have ever dreamed of. The experience, the joy and yes, the trials / tribulations are in the journey of life. This is how we in fact learn and experience the manner of happiness.
When we do not remember that the journey is the reason we are here we lose sight of the path to true success. This feeling of a place of arrival also causes us to remain where we are, become complacent and insulate ourselves from change or experiences that will build our ability to become successful. In essence we choose to stagnate. This false concept of a point of arrival can also cause disappointment and discouragement since we never seem to get there. May we free ourselves right now from such a cycle of degeneration. There is no point or place of arrival. Life is about our choosing to take the journey. This concept can give us unlimited understanding, vision and perspective. Consider the often used Parable of the Mountain. We speak of climbing the mountain top as an allegory of success or achieving goals and dreams in life. To differentiate this concept of a state of arrival verses the journey, consider that the goal of climbing the mountain top is not to get to the top of the mountain. What? The goal is instead what you experience on the way up the mountain, on top of the mountain and on the way down. If those who climbed Everest remained there at the top we would never know who they were, what they did or what it was like to experience it. The goal is never to get to a state where the goal or dream exists with us and we with it with no future purpose in permanent bliss. No way! The journey is far too fun and far too enriching to live that way. In the Parable of the Mountain we need to consider the view: what we saw at each point on the way up, what we could see at the top and what we saw differently on the way down because of the new perspective we gained throughout the journey. That is not all. What was the trail like? Were there obstacles? What about the different types of terrain? What equipment and supplies did you bring, use, etc.? The most important part of this whole experience is what did you learn? How did this experience change you? What made you keep going? How did you overcome the obstacles? What is different about you because of the mountain experience? Goals and dreams, indeed success, are much like the Parable of the Mountain.
There is NO point of arrival. It is all about the journey. The most important part of that journey is that to keep experiencing success you have to move on to the next mountain and take with you everything you have chosen to learn. Sometimes we forget that in experiencing the road of life the entire point is the experience. The road to success is much like the road of life. It is not so much a highway to a destination. It is instead a road trip that becomes the destination because of all that is experienced. Like any good road trip, we can just keep experiencing success if we choose to focus on the journey!
Practice does not make perfect, it teaches us what our best is and how to achieve it. Similar to our prior point this principle convinces us that we may never attain perfection yet that does not mean we cannot discover excellence in reaching for it. Too often we get discouraged if we do not do something perfectly or feel perfection is out of reach. Practice is the only way we can strive for perfection. The reality is we will not achieve perfection in this life, however, we can experience excellence. Practice gives us the ability to be excellent. Whether an athlete training for the Olympics, a musician striving to be a great star, a scientist searching for a cure to an illness, a businessperson building your dream or a salesperson seeking to hit a goal the practice you invest is integral to achieving excellence and thus success. “Some great athletes have had to overcome handicaps before they have succeeded in developing their talents. Shelly Mann was such an example. ‘At the age of five she had polio. … Her parents took her daily to a swimming pool where they hoped the water would help hold her arms up as she tried to use them again. When she could lift her arm out of the water with her own power, she cried for joy. Then her goal was to swim the width of the pool, then the length, then several lengths. She kept on trying, swimming, enduring, day after day after day, until she won the gold medal for the butterfly stroke—one of the most difficult of all swimming strokes’” (Ashton, 86). Likewise, I have always been inspired by the story of Ann Adams who was so disabled she could not move her arms or legs. She became an artist by training herself to draw by holding a pencil between her lips and using her mouth. One of my heroines is Helen Keller. Blind and Deaf, she wanted to learn to communicate, indeed to write and to inspire us all. Through a great teacher, she gained the ability to practice and learn. My favorite quote from her is, “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt by the heart.” (Keller, 1). Clearly, these great examples and their ability to choose to feel, perceive and see what many of us choose not to experience gave them the capability to achieve success in spite of their obstacles through practice! I dislike the word handicap, disability or the phrase special needs. Our son Joshua is special, he has different abilities. True he lacks abilities that others possess, yet he possesses something to compensate. This includes a “sixth sense” my wife and I have noticed that he has the ability to perceive how others feel: comfort them when they are down, etc. He also possesses a permanent optimism and mostly goes forward with a happy disposition regardless of what is going on around him. He is special and has unique abilities. Through practice he keeps exceeding expectations and limitations others have set for him because Joshua chooses not to see or acknowledge them. Often this passion, desire and drive to persist are greater. The will to practice and overcome are greater if the challenge is greater as well. Therefore, we may learn that even our opportunities and obstacles can be overcome through practice, teaching us our best so that we may pursue success.
We choose to practice. We choose to continually become excellent. We alone in shooting for perfection achieve our best through practice and this is the very essence of what excellence is. It is the juncture of possibilities and dreams where the most amazing discovery is the ability you have gained because you chose to pursue success. Through practicing, persisting at whatever we are trying to do or a skill we are learning or an opportunity we are strengthening we can become our best. So many times we talk about overcoming obstacles, weaknesses and eliminating passions. The truth is we may never completely overcome or eliminate these things. Yet we can learn from them, we can bridle them, we can practice overcoming them. Thus success will come from our flexing of our muscles against the resistance of life.
There are several ways we can apply this principle. One of them is our tendency to avoid things we don’t like, to face change with trepidation, to refuse to learn something new. We must get over ourselves, stop making excuses and liberate ourselves from the fear of failure. Ambrose Redmoon once penned, “Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the judgment that something is more important than fear.” (Redmoon, 1). Although our fears may never go away, can we value success more than fear? Absolutely! It is how anyone in history that achieved greatness did it. They looked in the face of fear and acted on the judgment that something else that they wanted to experience was more important than fear. In short they chose to define themselves, to experience the journey and to continually experience success. Only in doing this could they understand what their possibilities truly were. We can do the same.
Practice does not make perfect, it teaches us what our best is and how to achieve it. Let us succeed by learning some tools that practically help us apply the timeless principles we have been learning.
To be honest it wasn’t until a little later down the road I understood what he meant. My wife, Cortney, and I were surprised a little over two years ago with a curveball we had never expected. I was standing in a Macy’s store in Twin Falls, ID when my wife, who was pregnant at the time, called me to tell me that she had been to the doctor and something was wrong with our baby. That was the moment my whole world stood still. I remember driving home, fighting through tears and scared to death of what could happen. In the weeks to follow we went to many specialists most of which had never seen our son’s condition before. We soon came to realize how rare this condition was. In fact Joshua is one of only ten kids ever to be diagnosed with an aneurysm on his heart. The doctors told us eight of these kids died before birth, the ninth within two years of birth. Josh’s chances were slim and we would not know at any step of the journey what was going to happen. Talk about a defining moment. When you have to look the possible death of a child in the face against insurmountable odds and decide not to give up. This is a point at which we step into the darkness, we give up control. Before this experience I would have thought this would be the most limiting, hopeless and sure to fail experience in my life. Instead I found a freedom I had never experienced before. That at the moments of deepest fear, despair and possible failure in life we maintain our ability to choose what we do with our circumstances. We also gain the greatest ability to succeed because our vision, if we will lift our eyes from the moment, shows us things we have never seen before and never yet experienced. Now Joshua has been a miracle. He is two years old and has defied all the odds for everything. He has written his own story. We do not know how long he will be with us yet we have learned so much, we have chosen to rejoice in the journey and we have chosen to cherish each moment so that no matter what happens nothing can take from us the joy we have experienced from our little Joshua. That is true success that amidst the greatest challenges of life we can choose to experience joy, to succeed in the face of obstacles, to learn the lessons we would not otherwise learn and to go forward with faith regardless of the odds!
These principles may seem to be easier said than done. Like anything you will never know unless you have the courage to try them. To take a chance at believing and decide you will incorporate these timeless principles in your life and most importantly into your daily choices. Life in fact is simply the grand total of everything we choose. So first, let’s discover The Three Forgotten Secrets of Success:
1. We define ourselves by our choices.
2. There is NO point of arrival. It is all about the journey.
3. Practice does not make perfect, it teaches us what our best is and how to achieve it.
We define ourselves by our choices. We live in a world that says you are this way because of genetics, environment, etc. True there are things we may face and experience due to these factors. However, it is truly what we choose to do with these factors that will define who we are. It is not what life hands to us, we are not bound to act a certain way in every given circumstance. Just because something is human nature, a consequence of life we can’t control or anything else doesn’t mean we have to ever relinquish our ability to choose. The freedom to choose is the most liberating factor in helping us to achieve personal success. I have caught myself in the past saying, “I am not good with numbers so I am not analytical and cannot be good at that.” I learned to be analytical and apply the skills with numbers I never knew I had by jumping in, learning and actually applying analytics in business. I hear people say all the time, “I am just not good at that.” “I am not mechanically inclined.” “I don’t have that talent.” Whatever happened to believing we could learn and apply principles we may not have as second nature? We can apply these principles to us to become good at things we are not, learn things we don’t know and not give up before we begin. To begin indeed is the catalyst of successful thinking. We must choose to begin. To begin by not defining ourselves by rigid limitations that are not true. There are genetics, life circumstances, etc. that give limitations. I will not be a professional sports player. However, I choose whether or not that precludes my ability to be a good athlete, stay in shape, be an athletic coach, stay healthy due to an active lifestyle or to be a resource to my kids in helping them learn a sport they want to play. Wow! Look at how we just discovered in the midst of 1 limitation we had at least 5 possibilities! We choose to see the possibilities rather than the limitations. Nothing can ever take away our ability to choose to see, choose to act, choose to do and choose to achieve the possibilities which will exist no matter what life hands us! True it is we cannot be all things to all people. However, we can be many things. Within our sphere of talents and abilities our possibilities are endless.
One of the great, defining moments of my life happened in my younger years. As a child I was very shy. I had a tremendously difficult early childhood worrying about things going on around me and some very difficult experiences I went through. I turned inward, preferred playing by myself and became more disconnected from everyone else. My parents put me in preschool because they thought I was “antisocial” and would struggle in school. Those were the famous last words of my parents. I learned quickly that those having fun reached out to others, became involved and participated in many things. I was afraid and scared to death. Participating, talking to people, talking in front of people, etc. made my palms sweat, my stomach churn, etc. I began forcing myself to face it simply by doing what made me uncomfortable because I wanted to change. The desire to change is a beginning: a catalyst for something greater. We can then choose to act to re-enforce that desire regardless of the consequences we have to deal with. I cannot honestly identify the break through point yet somewhere in the midst of this pursuit I overcame my fear, the physical consequences were gone and I gained the ability to do something that before I could of said was an impossible limitation to overcome. Those who know me now with my excessive personality would wonder how it was possible I was ever a shy, self-conscious kid. People can change! I can now introduce myself and befriend perfect strangers. I can speak in front of huge crowds of people. This fundamental change to my personality has been crucial to success in everything I have done.
Even real limitations are not unconquerable when we see the possibilities and choose to go after them! One crucial principal in choosing to define who we are is to forget about what we cannot control and focus on what we can control! Too often we waste our lives, our time and thwart success by spending all our time worrying about or focusing on what we cannot control. It is expedient to set aside what we cannot control and go after what we can control in every moment we find ourselves in. One other thing to consider is what is actual verses what is perceived. Who said I was born shy? Really? Perhaps I became shy because of life’s factors and my choices involving them? Yet within myself was always the talent of reaching out to others and being outgoing. We may have dispositions and yet sometimes they are just a smoke screen to keep us from discovering our greatest talents. After all on the spectrum of strengths and weaknesses often our greatest weaknesses are just the opposite of our greatest strengths. That is indeed the reason we are given talents or strengths so we can use them to overcome our opportunities and weaknesses! Sometimes it is like having all of the weapons and losing the war because we simply do not choose to use them. How weak does the muscle that is never used become? Indeed, the greatest strength that that muscle achieves is when it faces resistance. What builds that muscle stronger and able to apply greater strength in the future is the amount of opposition, break down and building it experiences to become strong. That is why I love change! It causes us to challenge our comfort zone, get out of it and experience things we otherwise would not have chosen to experience no matter how difficult it is at the same time.
Nelson Mandela, a man who struggled through persecution to lead South Africa through apartheid and bitter racism faced an insurmountable challenge. After years of obstacles, defeats and what seemed as certain failure he said these words as the President of South Africa in his 1994 Inaugural Address (quoting Marianne Williamson, Return to Love), “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in all of us. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” (Williamson, 1992). Never forget that life may give and life may take yet we have the ability to choose to define ourselves, to see the possibilities, to focus on what we can control and forget about what we cannot. To succeed we truly hold the choice in our hands as to whether or not we will. Will you challenge your current thinking and choose to define yourself as able to choose who you want to become and what you want to do? Neal A. Maxwell said it this way, “Of course our genes, circumstances, and environments matter very much, and they shape us significantly. Yet there remains an inner zone in which we are sovereign, unless we abdicate. In this zone lies the essence of our individuality and our personal accountability.” (Maxwell, 26).
We define ourselves by our choices. We have the ability to succeed. The question is will we choose to? Ralph Waldo Emerson provided our hope in this statement, “That which we persist in doing becomes easier to us; not that the nature of the thing has changed, but our ability to do has increased.” (Emerson, 1). One of my favorite statements is: “It is not about me!” Think of all the learning, resources, other people, teams, etc. that we have access to in order to succeed! Our only mistake would be choosing to limit ourselves and give up on success.
There is NO point of arrival. It is all about the journey. So many of us are deceived by our false perception of the American Dream, or universally put the Dream of Humanity: to succeed and find happiness in life. Success whether material or anything else does not come from the lie that you can get something for nothing. Work is required and real labor with long-term perseverance alone produces results. Many people have a fleeting feeling daily that they are missing something in their lives. They reach for passion, fulfillment and the realization of their dreams. We always stretch for a future moment of arrival as if it was a static place of existence. This is the place where all of our dreams come true, when we receive all that we have suffered for, when all of our choices in our allusion finally mean something. The reality is that there is NO point of arrival. Life is not about arriving, it is about the journey. You never get to check into a perpetual resort where life stops and you become all that you wanted, experience everything you wanted and have all that you have ever dreamed of. The experience, the joy and yes, the trials / tribulations are in the journey of life. This is how we in fact learn and experience the manner of happiness.
When we do not remember that the journey is the reason we are here we lose sight of the path to true success. This feeling of a place of arrival also causes us to remain where we are, become complacent and insulate ourselves from change or experiences that will build our ability to become successful. In essence we choose to stagnate. This false concept of a point of arrival can also cause disappointment and discouragement since we never seem to get there. May we free ourselves right now from such a cycle of degeneration. There is no point or place of arrival. Life is about our choosing to take the journey. This concept can give us unlimited understanding, vision and perspective. Consider the often used Parable of the Mountain. We speak of climbing the mountain top as an allegory of success or achieving goals and dreams in life. To differentiate this concept of a state of arrival verses the journey, consider that the goal of climbing the mountain top is not to get to the top of the mountain. What? The goal is instead what you experience on the way up the mountain, on top of the mountain and on the way down. If those who climbed Everest remained there at the top we would never know who they were, what they did or what it was like to experience it. The goal is never to get to a state where the goal or dream exists with us and we with it with no future purpose in permanent bliss. No way! The journey is far too fun and far too enriching to live that way. In the Parable of the Mountain we need to consider the view: what we saw at each point on the way up, what we could see at the top and what we saw differently on the way down because of the new perspective we gained throughout the journey. That is not all. What was the trail like? Were there obstacles? What about the different types of terrain? What equipment and supplies did you bring, use, etc.? The most important part of this whole experience is what did you learn? How did this experience change you? What made you keep going? How did you overcome the obstacles? What is different about you because of the mountain experience? Goals and dreams, indeed success, are much like the Parable of the Mountain.
There is NO point of arrival. It is all about the journey. The most important part of that journey is that to keep experiencing success you have to move on to the next mountain and take with you everything you have chosen to learn. Sometimes we forget that in experiencing the road of life the entire point is the experience. The road to success is much like the road of life. It is not so much a highway to a destination. It is instead a road trip that becomes the destination because of all that is experienced. Like any good road trip, we can just keep experiencing success if we choose to focus on the journey!
Practice does not make perfect, it teaches us what our best is and how to achieve it. Similar to our prior point this principle convinces us that we may never attain perfection yet that does not mean we cannot discover excellence in reaching for it. Too often we get discouraged if we do not do something perfectly or feel perfection is out of reach. Practice is the only way we can strive for perfection. The reality is we will not achieve perfection in this life, however, we can experience excellence. Practice gives us the ability to be excellent. Whether an athlete training for the Olympics, a musician striving to be a great star, a scientist searching for a cure to an illness, a businessperson building your dream or a salesperson seeking to hit a goal the practice you invest is integral to achieving excellence and thus success. “Some great athletes have had to overcome handicaps before they have succeeded in developing their talents. Shelly Mann was such an example. ‘At the age of five she had polio. … Her parents took her daily to a swimming pool where they hoped the water would help hold her arms up as she tried to use them again. When she could lift her arm out of the water with her own power, she cried for joy. Then her goal was to swim the width of the pool, then the length, then several lengths. She kept on trying, swimming, enduring, day after day after day, until she won the gold medal for the butterfly stroke—one of the most difficult of all swimming strokes’” (Ashton, 86). Likewise, I have always been inspired by the story of Ann Adams who was so disabled she could not move her arms or legs. She became an artist by training herself to draw by holding a pencil between her lips and using her mouth. One of my heroines is Helen Keller. Blind and Deaf, she wanted to learn to communicate, indeed to write and to inspire us all. Through a great teacher, she gained the ability to practice and learn. My favorite quote from her is, “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt by the heart.” (Keller, 1). Clearly, these great examples and their ability to choose to feel, perceive and see what many of us choose not to experience gave them the capability to achieve success in spite of their obstacles through practice! I dislike the word handicap, disability or the phrase special needs. Our son Joshua is special, he has different abilities. True he lacks abilities that others possess, yet he possesses something to compensate. This includes a “sixth sense” my wife and I have noticed that he has the ability to perceive how others feel: comfort them when they are down, etc. He also possesses a permanent optimism and mostly goes forward with a happy disposition regardless of what is going on around him. He is special and has unique abilities. Through practice he keeps exceeding expectations and limitations others have set for him because Joshua chooses not to see or acknowledge them. Often this passion, desire and drive to persist are greater. The will to practice and overcome are greater if the challenge is greater as well. Therefore, we may learn that even our opportunities and obstacles can be overcome through practice, teaching us our best so that we may pursue success.
We choose to practice. We choose to continually become excellent. We alone in shooting for perfection achieve our best through practice and this is the very essence of what excellence is. It is the juncture of possibilities and dreams where the most amazing discovery is the ability you have gained because you chose to pursue success. Through practicing, persisting at whatever we are trying to do or a skill we are learning or an opportunity we are strengthening we can become our best. So many times we talk about overcoming obstacles, weaknesses and eliminating passions. The truth is we may never completely overcome or eliminate these things. Yet we can learn from them, we can bridle them, we can practice overcoming them. Thus success will come from our flexing of our muscles against the resistance of life.
There are several ways we can apply this principle. One of them is our tendency to avoid things we don’t like, to face change with trepidation, to refuse to learn something new. We must get over ourselves, stop making excuses and liberate ourselves from the fear of failure. Ambrose Redmoon once penned, “Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the judgment that something is more important than fear.” (Redmoon, 1). Although our fears may never go away, can we value success more than fear? Absolutely! It is how anyone in history that achieved greatness did it. They looked in the face of fear and acted on the judgment that something else that they wanted to experience was more important than fear. In short they chose to define themselves, to experience the journey and to continually experience success. Only in doing this could they understand what their possibilities truly were. We can do the same.
Practice does not make perfect, it teaches us what our best is and how to achieve it. Let us succeed by learning some tools that practically help us apply the timeless principles we have been learning.
Life
“Anyone who imagines bliss is normal is going to waste a lot of time running around and shouting that he has been robbed. The fact is that most putts don’t drop, most meat is tough, most children grow up to be just like people, most successful marriages require a high degree of mutual toleration and most jobs are more often dull than otherwise. Life is just like an old time rail journey… delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed. The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride." Gordon B. Hinckley
Monday, March 15, 2010
The Capacity to Take on Failure
This is the crux and sum total of all we have been talking about. The antithesis of success is failure. Yet it is also true you must often fail if you are to succeed often as well. How is this possible? It is because those who achieve the most success also know you must fail a lot and history has substantiated this. We reviewed initially in this discourse the case of Abraham Lincoln. Consider those who hold records like the most home runs, how many times do they strikeout? The greatest sales people on Earth hear “no” more than anyone else. They consequently hear “yes” more than anyone else. We must choose to develop within ourselves a capacity to take on failure. To look disappointment, despair, what we fear, the unknown, all of it in the face and say I will still act, I can still succeed and I will not let this limit me!
One key ingredient is overcoming the need to wallow in self-pity. It is time to move on. We can emancipate ourselves from the chains of pity by choosing to ask why we are experiencing these things rather than asking what we have done to deserve these experiences. For example, as a national debate champion in high school I won the vast majority of my debate rounds. However, I remember most vividly the ones I lost. I learned so much from them. I had my eyes opened to things I never would have seen without losing and in the end I went on to take down vastly more talented contenders because I had gained the skills from those experiences to choose success.
Why are we so afraid of “no,” of failure, of rejection? It may be human nature, it may be insecurity yet mostly it may just be that we remain in our comfort zone so that we do not have to experience it. Choosing to succeed involves seeing the possibilities. Is it true that “no” is hard to hear? Yes! It is also true that if we never heard “no” we would stop living indeed. Try just one day taking a pad and pen with you and tallying every time you hear the word “no.” We all hear “no” regularly and still keep going without drowning in despair. So what is it about rejection that is difficult? It is an emotional wake we come with that says unless all is ok, everyone agrees and we succeed we feel bad and do not know what to do. In fact our dislike of rejection, “no,” etc. is meant to help us learn and grow. Experiencing feelings of dissonance are equally as crucial as experiencing feelings of harmony. In the science of learning these feelings help us grow and develop as we discussed initially. Yet we have a conscious aversion both emotionally and cognitively to them mostly because we train ourselves and choose to learn from society that these things are wrong. For example, some families will avoid any subject with even a risk of dissonance or disagreement. The great debates in history have been respectful and still been a battle of discord resulting often in a better idea than all participants had individually. This still may not make it any easier to be rejected and face failure. We need to cast aside the teaching that you should never fail and believe that there is nothing wrong with failing if you choose to succeed by learning from it. Likewise, whoever said that just because something is difficult it I not valuable. Indeed the greatest blessings and most useful moments of life happen in the midst of our greatest difficulties and challenges. As a matter of fact, “no” is the vehicle that allows us to understand the value of “yes” and how we get to “yes.” Refer back to the role of practice in demonstrating to us what our best is and enabling us to achieve excellence. The more we experience “no” and rejection by not shielding ourselves from it, the more we will choose to succeed.
The example I always think of is the courting of my wife, Cortney, before our marriage. For me it was love at first sight yet she was not as convinced. I chased her for 7 months. She dumped me 7 times. Every time saying she wanted space and this would never work. Each time my friends and everyone told me there were other fish in the sea including many other girls that were interested in dating me. I wanted to marry Cortney. I wasn’t going to force her, stalk her or anything creepy yet I was not going to give up either. The last time she dumped me we had went to her hometown to visit her family. I asked her Dad’s permission to marry her. She found out and came back to school a little later than I had returned to work. Cortney called me, met me at a library of all places told me not to dare ask her to marry me. She told me that it would never work out, that she needed her space for a while. It was devastating. I had trouble believing that it would ever work out. Somewhere, somehow I had to dig deep and chose to believe that she could still choose to love me and we might someday get married. Amazing enough I acted on my faith that it could happen. I bought the engagement ring in the midst of that breakup and my family thought I was nuts. Sure enough I got a phone call about a month later and it was Cortney. She wanted me to come and see her. That night we were engaged. It has been almost 12 years of marriage now. She is the most amazing person I have ever met! I am so thankful that every time she said “no” and I was rejected I did not let it inhibit my ability to believe it could one day happen. As a matter of fact all of the “no’s” made the one “yes” one of the most amazing things I have ever experienced. Now 12 years later we have been blessed with 7 children. I often hold them, rock them to sleep and think about what might have been had I given up at the first or second “no” let alone the 6th or 7th.
The capacity to take on failure has to be found in our choice to do so. To act is not that courageous yet to act in the face of risk, failure, rejection and “no” is truly extraordinary. We develop this capacity as we continually choose to act with the possibility of rejection. To not let our fears hold our dreams hostage. We can then persist in a habit that becomes as much a part of us as the joy and elation when we hear “yes.” Consider the power of becoming an individual that is not limited by failure but instead propelled forward by it with the greater learning that this failure allowed us to achieve. In essence the only true failure is to not try, to give up, to stop going forward. We choose if we will turn the capacity to take on failure into the wellspring of experiencing success!
Truly timeless principles can never be overshadowed by those personal struggles that all of us may face and overcome in life. In everything we do the power to choose success is an inherent right unless we knowingly surrender it. There is nothing in life, our profession or anything we do that can take it from us. Success may remain elusive to us yet we will have to face the fact that this is what we have chosen. Or our lives can dramatically be different today. We can embrace the 3 Secrets of Success, live the 5 Maxims of Success and use the Tools of Self-Discovery and Success that will help us develop into a person who chooses to see possibilities grasping their dreams and ultimate success. Passion is not enough, we must choose. Motivation is not enough, we must choose. Desire is not enough, we must choose. It is the ultimate test of the human spirit and the greatest demonstration of our character to understand and act on the power of POSSIBILITIES by exercising daily our ability to choose success.
As we draw this voyage of discovering the ability to succeed in all of us to a close. I am reminded of President Kennedy’s words concerning the Cold War and what would seem to be a hopeless battle at the time that would never be won. “The problems of the world cannot be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by obvious realities. We need men and women who can dream of things that never were.” Who believed the Cold War would ever be over, that the
Friday, March 5, 2010
Rights and Responsibilities
I home teach an awesome family for Church. Their names are the Lopez's. They have lived and worked in the US for many years legally and Brother Lopez was sworn in as a US Citizen this week. I went to the ceremony with the family in SLC, UT. Then we had a fiesta all day with Sister Lopez cooking amazing Peruvian food. The events surrounding this and the deep patriotic spirit in my blood have caused me to reflect on the blessing it is to live and truly pursue happiness in this great nation. For all the political bickering and economic woe I still feel incredibly blessed to live in this free nation ordained and upheld by the hand of God.
I thought of the words of George Washington in his first Inaugural Address, "I dwell on this prospect with every satisfaction which an ardent love for my Country can inspire, since there is no truth more thoroughly established than that there exists in the economy and course of nature an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness; between duty and advantage; between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity; since we ought to be no more persuaded that the propitiuous smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained; and since the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the Republican model of government are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people." In summary that there are duties and moral obligations that come with the preservation of liberty and individual rights.
At the ceremony where Brother Lopez was sworn in, this was something that I treasured. The presentation was incredibly patriotic. At the same time the judge allowed several of the new citizens to comment on why they became a citizen. Some said for jobs or rights or other things. Several were refugees. One very moving story was a young man from Sudan. He was one of the "lost boys of Sudan." Taken from families and forced to use a machine gun taller than he was in the war torn nation for most of his life. He sought freedom and a place to belong. A nation where he could determine his own destiny and get away from war. Others talked about fear of their government and fleeing for political asylum because in their nations they were not free.
I had tears come to my eyes as I treasured their powerful testimonies of what was something many of us often take for granted the right to be free. However, several also talked about how they had lived in this great nation and received so many liberties and blessings because of living here. They wanted to give back and uphold the responsibilities they should have been giving. This group really touched my heart. To hear someone who understands that the crux of moral liberty is not unrestrained freedom but instead freedom with responsibility. We have the freedom to vote. We have the responsibility to actually vote in every election, know and study the candidates and write to those we elect. So many rights are cherished without upholding our end of the social contract which is our constitution. That is my message today. To seize life and live it in a free nation we must live out our rights and responsibilities. We cannot shirk and be free. Without moral liberty we have no freedom to choose, just freedom with unlimited consequence for our choices.
As George Washington so eloquently said, "... since we ought to be no more persuaded that the propitiuous smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained; and since the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the Republican model of government are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people."
God bless America! And God bless that the people of America will live up to their rights and responsibilities that this nation might endure and the "sacred fire of liberty" not be extinguished!
Sunday, February 28, 2010
The Power of Balance
Many people have a fleeting feeling daily that they are missing something in their lives. They reach for passion, fulfillment and the realization of their dreams. Always stretching for a future moment of arrival. This is the place where all of our dreams come true, when we receive all that we have suffered for, when all of our choices in our allusion finally mean something. The reality is that there is NO point of arrival. Life is not about arriving, it is about the journey.
Experiencing the road of life, making choices along the way. You never get to check into a perpetual resort where life stops and you become all that you wanted, experience everything you wanted and have all that you have ever dreamed of. The experience, the joy and yes, the trials / tribulations are in the journey of life. This is how we in fact learn and experience the manner of happiness.
Having now discovered the journey we were previously blinded by let's now discuss the vehicle that enables our journey to be the best road trip ever! This vehicle is balance. Consider for a second if we always did everything for ourselves, our society was full of only self-serving individuals and we spent all our time drenched in hedonism where pleasure is our god and moral standards dissipate. Such indulgence would become very unbalanced, very unfruitful and truthfully would not satisfy. Time is a scarce and limited resource. How we spend it determines who we are, who we will become and who we will impact the most in this life.
The best balance is found in the realization we are spiritual beings with dimensions that flow from this core. Often defined by scholars and scientists as the 4 dimensions of ourselves: Spiritual, Emotional, Physical Mental. The first mastery at balance is what we choose regarding ourselves and these aspects we possess. We often emphasize one and let the others fall by the wayside or not develop them enough. Anything to the extreme can be unhealthy and individually damaging to balance and health. Religions from Christianity to Judaism to Mohammedanism to Buddhism recognize the value of balance in centering a righteous life and gaining peace and happiness.
The core of the principle of balance and achieving success in life is founded in priorities. Priorities are nothing more or nothing less than how we give focus to our time in our 4 core areas of individual development and need. However, this also extends outside of ourselves in our own actualization. For example, how we balance time between God, Family, Community, Country, Career, etc. I have always had a time trying to evaluate how to do this. As a super achiever I would always think I could just do everything in every category and somehow do it all well. I would cut out of sleep, physically and mentally overextend myself. I would focus unduly on my own success and career while neglecting family and health. All of us have our own trials in our lives that challenge balance and the ability to succeed. The key is to recognize that when our lives are out of balance we suffer in some category and fail to grasp daily fulfillment, joy in our journey and ultimate hope in where we will end up when our time on Earth rapidly comes to a close.
In the end, a simple self-assessment as to what areas you need to improve to become more balanced and better able to achieve success is needed regularly. Keep in mind there are natural stages of life where we may be asked to give a greater portion of time to one area. This just means for the scale of time to remain balanced and for us not to overextend ourselves the rest of the areas we do not need as much focus on must have the time we commit to them reduced so that we do not tip the scale and break the balance of our time. For example, parents in rearing children face a span of life where the time committed to home and family life may supercede other less important priorities. However, even in this there is a caution that we must not neglect crucial aspects of ourselves or we cannot be any good for anyone.
The power of balance frees us from the false idea that we must be everything to everyone. It focuses us on the 4 core dimensions of ourselves. It keeps us from becoming unhealthy or unsuccessful or worse; unhappy everyday. We need to reach out and grab the opportunities we have today. To enjoy them and relish the time focused on the right priorities now. This will bring true fulfillment and happiness. As we evaluate daily, weekly, monthly and yearly the balance we have and the time we give to different aspects of our lives we need to celebrate the successes we have in achieving happiness. The purpose of life is to have joy in making investments in lasting things like families, relationships and service to others. No matter what life gives us we have a choice to make in what we do with our time and how we invest in the principle of balance. The power of this opportunity in affecting how we feel each and everyday cannot be overstated.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
See the Possibilities and Dare to Go After Your Dreams!
Sometimes when governments, economies or life seems to leave us in a struggle it is really just a wake up call to revive the dreams and passions we have for what we truly want to become - Henry David Thoreau said, "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined." I wish that for everyone that they see possibilities amidst all of these opportunities!!
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