The Journey is how you Excel!

Written By @CoreyLStokes

I recently read Quitter by Jon Acuff.    He talks about how we kill out dream jobs by giving up on them too soon. He says we think that it is supposed to happen for us over night.  We look at success stories and see end results of that persons years of hard work. And we compare the work we are doing to what we see now. We usually give up when we don’t immediately see the success that others have seen.  My wife hears all the time how I wish my dreams would move a little faster.  I’ve followed the guidelines set by the pioneers in my field, and I’ve worked diligently on it for hours.  I should be successful now! Right?  But the truth of the matter is you cannot compare their ending to your beginning.  You must give your dream a chance to set roots and grow in its own time.

Mr. Acuff also compares getting where we want to go to the stories of young  David (from the bible) and Cinderella. In the story of David.  He was chosen but he spent many years as a shepherd before he became king.    Where as Cinderella, danced with the prince at the ball and lived happily ever after (unless you’ve seen part 2 and 3).  We get caught up in the end results and forget about the journey we need to take to get there.images

Dreams don’t happen over night. They take years of preparation, planning and practice to be ready to take advantage of the opportunity when it presents itself.  Robert Greene says before, you hit mastery, You have to go through roughly 10000 hours of training, preparation, and practice.  The journey where you make mistakes, where you prefect your craft without much embarrassment.  It is much easier to redefine and reinvent yourself when you only have ten followers as opposed to having ten thousand followers.

Here are a few thing you can do in the mean time:

1.) Do your dream. My dream is to write and speak! Although my wife tells me I should focus on the speaking aspect.  I believe I have a message that young men and women of today need to hear.  So I do what I can to get that message out spelling errors and all.  Like I said I want to write not edit!

2.) Don’t give up your day job.  Your day job gives you comfort and security. Yes it takes time away from accomplishing your dream but guess what, your dream is not paying the bills right now.  Working a regular 9 – 5 allows you, as Jon Acuff says , the ability to say “No” to the offer that doesn’t suit your needs.

3.) Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.  Mistakes is where we learn.  Don’t be afraid to fail.  As a kid, My mother would tell us, “Don’t touch the stove it’s hot”. What did we do? We touched it anyway.  The mistake of not listening to mom. That resulted in getting burned; and we learned, don’t touch the stove, it’s hot.

4.) Just get started. I sat on my first book for years before I decided to publish it. While I did nothing with it, that is exactly what happened nothing.  The writings just sat in my computer file taking up cyberspace.  Even if you fail, you’ve done something. you’ve taken a step toward your dream and you’ve probably learned something in the process. If you don’t take that first step however, you learn nothing, you accomplish nothing, you lose nothing and you gain nothing.  So just do it!

Two kinds of failure! What is stopping your success?

If you are not careful, one of the most important lessons of success may pass you by. Many people go from success to success not gaining any insight or growth from their experiences. With this type of success this person, Will never know how to succeed.  It is better to try, and fail. So that you will learn in order to try again!

Over the weekend, my son and I made an attempt at building a box with dovetail joint!  Knowing I could only hold my son’s attention no more than a few moments, I let him run the router.  We carefully pushed each board through the router, until we were complete,   making adjustments for the male and female ends of the joint.  When the dust cleared (literally, because I forgot to turn the vacuum on),  we had made our box. The dovetail joints however,  were so out of alignment that we could not help but call the experience an epic failure.  We tried again, and got a littler closer but we still did not get the joints successfully aligned.  Eventually I lost his attention and he was on to other things.  In this one session, although we didn’t make sour dovetail jointed box.  We did learn how not to make it.  Knowledge that we will use on our next attempt.

Even when writing this blog post.  I must have rewritten it more than 5 times before I felt it was good enough to send out. Remember our successes build our confidence but,  we learn from our mistakes.  As you read and become familiar with the passage below, keep in mind that failure from trying will lead you to even greater success.

Passage from Robert Greene Mastery

Think of it this way: There are two kinds of failure. The first comes from never trying out your ideas because you are afraid, or because you are waiting for the perfect time. This kind of failure you can never learn from, and suck timidity will destroy you. The second kind comes from a bold and venturesome spirit. If you fail in this way, the hit that you take to your reputation is greatly outweighed by what you learn. Repeated failure will toughen your spirit and show you with absolute clarity how things must be done. In fact, it is a curse to have everything go right on your first attempt. You will fail to question the element of luck, making you think that you have the golden touch. When you do inevitably fail, it will confuse and demoralize you past the point of learning. In any case, … you must act on your ideas as early as possible, exposing them to the public, a part of you even hoping that you’ll fail. You have everything to gain.”

What have you failed at lately? What was the outcome when you tried again?