The biggest generator of long term results is learning to do things when you don’t feel like doing them. Discipline is more reliable than motivation.
I’ve long been fascinated by the occasional willingness by people to go from idea to reality. Ideas are a dime a dozen. To move to reality takes that first step. Taking the first step takes courage, a willingness to possibly fail. That courage includes a willingness that other people (and often you, yourself) will laugh at your attempts that don’t work. We need the strength to take that first step even though we know that many or most of those first steps will end in failure. Some of our first steps will even be laughed at by others, sometimes by others who we consider our friends. Good friends will support us even in our failed attempts. Good friends do not step on our dreams. Those who laugh at us for our failures are not good friends–they don’t understand us and they don’t understand what it takes to succeed. It takes grit It takes many failures to succeed.
Here’s to good friends and courage and the ability to laugh back at those who laugh at our failures! Today’s assignment: Go take that first step to make an idea become reality. Today, take that first step that will probably fail. The alternative is to waste away your life.
It’s what we call “throwing shit against the wall and see what sticks.”. I guess that’s how we went from crafts/woodworking/soaps/essential oils into chicken eggs and chicken breeding and broiler raising to 90 pigs, 300 breeders/laying hens, 900 turkey of 12 varieties, 2000+ broilers, fainting goats, Great Pyrenees dogs, ducks and Regenerative rotational crops and grazing. You have to take a chance to realize your dreams. They can be accomplished and in many cases, there are government agencies and grants and help to make it happen. If failure was the measuring tool of success, success would be impossible to accomplish. Great read my brother.
Parish is a gem. About his career in intelligence, he says “Unfortunately, I can’t talk about anything interesting without going to jail.” I, on the other hand, found that the greatest challenge in intelligence is overcoming boredom. The monumentally tedious and colorless life is interrupted at unpredictable intervals by occasional flashes of lightning. In twenty years, I probably had a sum total of three hours of excitement, in increments measured in single-digit minutes.
Your thoughts are a decent prologue to the book Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. I am a long-time devotee of Charan, who I suspect is actually an extraterrestrial. No one that bright can possibly be from Earth.
Thanks, Bill. I will check out Execution . . . Right away!
I’m still thinking about this quote. This is frame that helps me a lot, because the alternative for me, much of the time, is inaction, fear of trying something, laziness and allowing the sands of time slip through my fingers.
This is also the secret to learning another language. I speak six plus social niceties of another three or four. I jump in and do. If I worried about getting something wrong, I would be permanently tongue-tied. As early as possible in the process I start speaking in the language, easiest if you’re learning through immersion. We moved to Germany when our daughters were ten and eight. The first night we went out to dinner and I told them they had to order their own drinks. I would tell them the words to say, but they had to say them. We added various things so that by the end of the month both were reading menus and ordering food in German. Being willing to be laughed at is a major advantage.
I would add: Not caring about being laughed at is critically important for doing most things in life.
The biggest generator of long term results is learning to do things when you don’t feel like doing them what is the meaning of this quote? I don’t get it at all.
Anonymous,
It sounds to me like the first corollary to the Rule of Deferred Gratification.