Have you ever wanted to beat your head against the wall in frustration?
ARGHHHHHH!!!!!!
You were typing a paper and the computer crashed.
Maybe you needed to work on an assignment and Microsoft decided that was the perfect time to update its system, which took about half an hour, and then things did not work the way they had an hour ago.
You were hoping to have some relatively quiet to work on some tasks and your family had other plans. Of course, no one bothered to tell you that.
You were planning a nice, quiet, relaxing weekend, and your child wakes you up at 2:00 AM with a plaintive whimper of “I don’t feel too good”.
I am could go on and on, but I am sure you already have a list of times that your plans did not work out as you anticipated.
That tends to want to kill motivation, doesn’t it?
Have you ever lost points on an assignment because you forgot to do something?
My assignment checklist can help you remember the details.
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Everyone has faced a moment of doubt about going forward; they do not think that failure is success in progress.
I would suspect that you might have tried to do something as a child. Maybe you made a comment about what you wanted to be when you grew up. Someone important to you, or a lot of someones, told you “You cannot do that. You are too … [fill in the blank].
For whatever reason, that comment stuck. It stuck in your mind with a bond tighter than superglue. From that moment, you decided that you could not do a lot of the things you wanted.
You were too young at that point to realize that the adults might have had other agendas. Maybe they had doubts about themselves and that reflected on what they told you. Karyl McBride, Ph.D., discusses how children with narcissistic parents get a lot of negative messages from their parents. In my experience, this kind of thing happens even to people who do not have narcissistic parents.
Being told by someone else that you cannot do something does NOT mean that you cannot do that thing.
The problem is that we have learned to doubt and question ourselves because of what other people think is possible.
Remember, no one else is you. No one else has your skills or your abilities or your drive. You CAN make things happen that no one else can. Learn to accept that failure really is success in progress. How can you achieve meaningful success if you do not fail first? I would bet that anything you do well on the first try is not meaningful to you. Those things that really mean something to you are important BECAUSE you first failed at them.
Take the world as you find it
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I think there is a quote about half the battle is won when someone shows up. I could not find that, but I did find “We win half the battle when we make up our minds to take the world as we find it, including the thorns” attributed to Orison S. Marden.
Dr. Marden attended Harvard Medical School in the 1800s and founded Success magazine in 1897. The magazine still exists today, so I guess he did something right in that startup! I am also sure that if I did a lot of research, I would discover that a lot of people told him that was a bad idea. I am sure he had a lot of “thorns” when he decided to start the magazine.
His quote is very valid, I think. The thorns are all around us. Your children write in crayon on your major class paper. You are asked to work extra hours at work on the day before you have a major exam. The car battery dies when you are trying to get to class. If it is not the car, then your Wi-Fi connection disappears. We will not even think about the plumbing…
You can add to the list, I am sure.
Our path in life is not simple
This statement may seem more than a little odd but think about it. You cannot really learn something well if you did not mess up at some point.
A student of mine also once told me that “Fail means ‘First attempt in learning‘”. My student was right.
Think about that. No one learns anything of value without failing first. Failure is success in progress. If you did not fail, how could you progress? How would you know HOW to progress without knowing what needed to be corrected?
Remember learning to ride your bicycle? You had to fall a few times before you got the hang of balancing. You do not remember learning to walk, but you had to fall, in other words, “fail”, before you could master walking. Most of your current skills were not unqualified successes the first time you did them, were they?
I have heard stories that Harlan Sanders, the “Colonel Sanders” of KFC (formerly Kentucky Fried Chicken) fame, offered over 1,000 restaurants an opportunity to share his chicken recipe before he found someone who was willing to take a chance on him and the recipe.
Thomas Edison tried over 100 different items to make the filament in a light bulb so it would work. If he had given up after the tenth failure, I wonder what the world would look like now. Edison knew that he would have to fail before he found the right items for his inventions. I can only imagine how many people told him he was crazy, stupid, or any other number of names, because they could not understand his willingness to accept failure.
Have you ever seen a cartoon of someone who faces failure, stops, and retreats, without knowing that success was on the other side of the last wall?
Could you be there now?
Have you ever lost points on an assignment because you forgot to do something?
My assignment checklist can help you remember the details.
Check it out!
Every great success on Earth has failure somewhere in its background; failure really is success in progress
reminds us that “History confirms that every great success on Earth has failure somewhere in its background.”
If you want to achieve your goals and dreams, you will find the path much easier when you decide to accept the thorns. There will be thorns. Have no doubt about that. If you accomplish something easily, I would bet you do not really think it was much of an accomplishment.
Think about some of the compliments you have received from other people. “You do that so well”. You blow it off because you think that is nothing. That is because the thing is easy for you, but it is not easy for other people. You discount your own skills and abilities simply because they are easy for you.
What really makes us feel good is accomplishing things that frustrated us to what we thought was our limit – but we kept pushing. That is what allows us to grow and accomplish things. That is how we make changes in our lives.
Do you really want to spend your life thinking “What would have happened if…?”
You can wake up on your 60th (70th? 80th?) birthday morning and wonder “What would have happened IF…” What would my life be like now IF …” You can also wake up tomorrow or next week and realize you are pushing through and learning what will happen. Doesn’t that make you feel good?
Well, OK. So maybe you want to throw something against the wall because you forgot something. At least you are Doing Something. There are a lot of people who talk about doing things, but never put action into words. You are a doer. You WILL make it happen.
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Until next week,
Valerie
Providing information and tools to help harried adult college students earn their degrees without losing their sanity.
Have you ever lost points on an assignment because you forgot to do something?
My assignment checklist can help you remember the details.
Check it out!
updated 12 January 2023