Not everyone will understand your journey. That’s fine. It’s not their journey to make sense of. It’s yours.
Author | Photographer | CG Artist | Filmmaker
If you have 1 good idea or write 1 good phrase, people will steal it (even wealthy well-known people & companies have done this) ThatsLife. Success that sticks often requires not just 1 good idea, but a stream of many. DontQuit! Get known for *many* good things, not just 1.
Don’t let your perception of others steal your thunder. Just because someone did something similar to what you’re doing (or want to do) doesn’t mean you can’t offer a strong or unique alternative. There is room for you to be successful, too.
— Zero Dean (@ZeroDean) January 11, 2019
On many occasions, the answer to problems in one area of your life will come as a result of making progress somewhere else.
Refuse to waste time being deterred by something you can’t do and focus on something else that you can. Sometimes the rewards for your efforts on one path will help provide you with what you need to go down another.
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Don’t stop working towards a goal just because the path to it isn’t as direct or as easy as you hoped it would be. It is often the lessons one learns on their journey that are exactly what one needs to complete it.
“What we learn to do, we learn by doing.” — Aristotle
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We are often unaware of the struggles that others must face in order to achieve success. As Lee Honda put it, “Success is 99% failure.”
Know that whatever it is you wish to accomplish, no two people, businesses, or ventures are exactly the same. You can’t help but bring a unique perspective to your endeavors and a unique combination of talents and skills.
So even if the field is crowded, understand that you can succeed, too, but in order to do so, it is essential that you put in the effort and take action to achieve your goals.
Getting discouraged at others’ accomplishments and giving up because you feel you can’t compete gets you nowhere.
Constantly comparing yourself to others is waste of energy. There will always be someone better at something than you are.
A wise person once said, “Comparison is the thief of joy.”
Don’t let the success of others discourage you from your own endeavors or make you bitter. If someone has done or is doing something you would like to do, let it inspire you and be an indicator that you, too, can achieve great things.
Achieving personal goals series:
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Excerpt from: Motivation & achievement
When one’s motivation is dependent on external sources, the moment those sources are absent is the moment one’s motivation begins to fade. This is because motivation is a state of mind.
And if a particular state of one’s mind is dependent on the availability of things it doesn’t always have control over, it can be difficult to attain the state of mind associated with those things when they’re unavailable.
This is why it’s important to learn how to develop the mental discipline necessary to be one’s own source of motivation.
When one is able to motivate themselves, they light a kind of fire that can burn indefinitely.
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Every so often someone likes to challenge “Follow your passion” by suggesting that people shouldn’t (Huffington Post | Wojtek Skalski). And that’s fine.
But it’s important to realize that there is rarely a single approach to life that works best for all people.
“Do not follow your passion.” suggests that countless wise and successful people who have advised it are wrong. And that isn’t necessarily the case.
Because for at least some, follow your passion is the answer.
But whether it involves pursuing one’s passions or not, folks who dispense life advice would likely be far wiser offering open-minded suggestions than absolutes.
Neither is necessarily bad advice. It simply depends on what one’s source of motivation and values are in life.
Success can be defined and measured in many ways.
Not everyone measures wealth with money. Not everyone wants to lead a conventional life. And not everyone has the courage to go after what they truly want.
Whether a person ultimately succeeds at turning their passion into a sustainable career or not, one thing is for certain, they will no longer live with the regret of never having tried.
What is one of the primary purposes of life if not to continually reaching out for newer, richer, deeper, life-changing experiences?
People who don’t think that involves pursuing one’s passions may be successful at what they do, but at the expense of being truly fulfilled by it.
Video: Why you will fail to have a great career | Larry Smith |TED
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From personal relationships to business to politics, the person who isn’t afraid to be themselves, make mistakes, and even challenge you, is generally acting with far more integrity than the person attempting to do, say, and convey all the right things in order to win your affection, support or business.
Beware those afraid to show their human side or the work or thought process that led to whatever they’re saying or selling.
It’s probably wiser to consider wisdom from a wise & imperfect person — that acts like a real human being — than it is to take wisdom from a “wise” & “perfect” person that acts like a robot.
The former suggests authenticity. The latter suggests someone trying to hide their true self in order to come across as something that they’re not.
It’s one thing to have the answers, it’s another to have earned them from experience.
Don’t fall victim to those seemingly perfect people or products that cater to your ego or sense of self-worth in order to profit from your patronage.
No one in this world is perfect. There are only people who pretend to be.
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The person who screws up & learns from the experience has a lot more to offer than the person who appears perfect because they never risk making a mistake or appearing imperfect to others.
People who suffer one failure after another — only to ultimately succeed — have a fundamental understanding of experiences that people who get lucky or cheat their way to success never get.
In fact, even people who never achieve the goal they set out to accomplish often have more wisdom to offer about the experience of trying to achieve that goal than those who were able to attain it easily or without effort.
One gains far more from their struggles in life than they do from their successes.
There is a tremendous amount of value in being imperfect.
Forgive yourself and others of past mistakes and, instead, put your focus on where it is of most value, what was learned from them.
Strive for progress, not perfection.
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“When your determination changes, everything will begin to move in the direction you desire. The moment you resolve to be victorious, every nerve and fiber in your being will immediately orient itself toward your success. On the other hand, if you think, ‘This is never going to work out,’ then at that instant every cell in your being will be deflated and give up the fight.” — Daisaku Ikeda
In order to succeed at any goal worth achieving, one must not only be prepared to face fear, challenges, hardships, and failure, one must be willing to overcome each of these things repeatedly.
It isn’t enough to simply try and fail and try again. One must build the tenacity necessary to keep trying long after one’s expectations of success have been challenged beyond imagining.
From the limited perspective one has at the onset of any journey, the pathway to one’s ultimate destination is often far less clear than it’s imagined to be — with a potential “plot twist” lying in wait at every turn.
As such, it’s important to remember that failures and setbacks are as much a part of the process of success as small victories are along the way. And that the road to success is often revealed most by the lessons learned from failed attempts to navigate it without a map.
Every failure in life provides valuable experience that, in turn, can provide illumination on one’s journey. But to reap the most from that experience, it’s important to not allow our failures to discourage us from pushing forward towards our goals.
As the Chinese proverb goes, “The temptation to quit will be greatest just before you are about to succeed.”
In other words, never underestimate the power of persistence.
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