The Boring (but effective) Cure for Failure

So here’s the thing…I failed.

And not in the traditional sense. Not in the catastrophic, life-threatening way that can actually hurt other people. But instead, I failed myself.

Which in actuality is a lot more painful than anyone else can ever realize. No one can experience your pain. Yes, maybe they can empathize with you and try to understand what you are experiencing. They may even have had a similar enough of an experience to almost feel your pain.

Almost…

But in the end, they can never truly understand with the feeling of letting Yourself down. Only you can relate to how it feels to deal with the good and bad of ourselves on a 24/7 basis.

No one else.

And if you set personal goals and expectations that you want to achieve, it becomes increasingly more painful to see those slip past you while the rest of the world moves along at a pace that never seems to slow down and let us catch our breath — hoping for a break in the waves.

The Better Choice

So what choice does that leave us with? Well for me, the biggest issue wasn’t that I had unrealistic expectations. In fact, considering my life circumstances, they were fairly achievable.

The problem lied within my daily mindset that stayed with me on a regular basis. And as I look back on it now, I see one defining quality that I lacked which could have served me well.

Patience

I always knew I was an impatient person, but never really thought of it as a negative quality. In my mind, being impatient just meant that I didn’t like sitting in traffic, or waiting an extra day for a package to arrive.

Big deal! Who cares? Nobody likes dealing with that stuff, so why should it cause me any harm?

It wasn’t until just recently that I actually discovered the importance of patience. It wasn’t until I looked at the successful people around me who had achieved what I desired, that I realized the quality they all possessed.

Not a single one was an overnight or even an overmonth success. They dug in for the long haul and got better every single day. Not a week passed by that they weren’t looking to learn something new or improve in an area they once struggled. These actions can be so subtle that no one would ever notice. They can be as simple as taking an extra 20 minutes to review your notes or eating fruit instead of a bag of chips.

From an outside perspective, these mundane moments of life are hardly noteworthy. If anything, they simply become the way we view that person and how we perceive them on a regular basis. To the untrained eye, nothing spectacular is ever happening. Where the magic is really happening, few of us will ever see.

“People are praised in public for what they have practiced in private for years.” — Tony Robbins

And that’s because it happens internally, within the conscious mind of that one specific person. They see that extra lap as something bigger. They know that it adds up and compiles on top the last “extra” moment. But unless you are watching very carefully, you would never see that from the outside. And much like my personal anguish towards my failure that I experienced, no one will ever know what it feels like to be ME.

No matter how hard they try. At the end of the day, it’s my thoughts and my actions that affect the path my life takes.

So I have a choice. We all have a choice.

Will I spend today dwelling on the past or day-dreaming about the future — or will I actually humble myself enough to make the most of this incredibly boring and mundane moment because I realize that it will actually affect the rest of my life? Will I do that “extra” thing? Will I wait a little longer for results? Will I see the importance of the next boring moment, and the next and the next?

This is the choice we have to make. And you what the hardest part is? We have to make this choice EVERY SINGLE DAY. For the rest of our lives.

But that’s what it takes. Things aren’t going to change because you wish they would. We actually have to do something about it.

-Derek