The Problem With Me

Dear loving people,

Increasingly, I come across people who made up their minds to rise to prominence and then they turn around and focus on things that rather destroy their chances of achieving success or they sit by and wish success will happen on its own. You know something? Part of the reason many people don’t make it to the success mark is because we lie to ourselves. We joke most of the time. We don’t dare to face the truth.

Ask me why? For a multiplicity of reasons. Some of us are always making up excuses. Some of us are not disciplined enough to take on the hard work. The rest of us are afraid of success. You may be thinking, “Hey! I’m no liar!” but the thing is, the lies are subtle. Most, if not all of us are guilty of lying to ourselves from time to time.

Imagine you rush home to get things set because you expect important visitors. When you enter your sitting room, you get a pungent smell so, you set to work to neutralize the odor – but it doesn’t go away. You try harder and harder spraying all sorts of air fresheners, but nothing changes. You get frustrated and annoyed and can’t get the air in the room fresh.

Do you know that the problem was never the smell in the room but rather a dead rat under one of the sofas that is the origin of the pungent odor? Your mind is the ‘dead rat’ and your life the ‘pungent odor’. If you smell the disturbing pungent odor in the room, you don’t need to just spray odor neutralizers – but rather get rid of the dead rat that produce it. Don’t go through life thinking you need to neutralize the “pungent odor” (your life) – instead get rid of the ‘dead rat’ (your mind) by changing the way you think.

You tell yourself “I just need a lucky breakthrough.” As you tell yourself this, you visualize success. The problem is that the chances of this lucky breakthrough happening are about the same as winning the lottery. There is another issue here. You are deceiving yourself in thinking that the winners have always had it easy and have never had to struggle. They got lucky and they never had to deal with grinding poverty, unfair competition, and backbreaking hard work. The reality is a lot different. It takes nerve, determination, persistence, and a vision to succeed. The lucky breakthrough may come but waiting around is not going to make that happen.

 

You tell yourself “I must wait for the right moment.” You think that there will be the perfect niche and you will know when to pounce on it to make it into a roaring success. You just have to wait until the time is right and you keep putting things off. Let me tell you, if Charles Jenkins had persisted in that belief we would never have had the television.

 

Napoleon Hill insists that “Procrastination is the bad habit of putting off until the day after tomorrow what should have been done the day before yesterday.”

 

When you tell yourself “I shouldn’t struggle.” Remember that your struggles are not your problem it is your response to them that can become a problem. When you struggle, you don’t flow with life, accept, and embrace life as it comes. What if you see your struggles as gifts that give you the optimal opportunities to grow, develop and mature? Eliminate the idea of struggles and problems: Life either presents itself as “blissful experiences or as blissful opportunities to learn”.

Make a decision to tell yourself the plain truth. Face your adversities and dreams squarely and never be afraid of failure even if it were staring at you in the face. “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.” says J.K.Rowling