As Walt Whitman once said:
Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you. You must travel it by yourself. It is not far. It is within reach. Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know. Perhaps it is everywhere — on water and land.
Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important than the outcome. Life is a series of smaller destinations. The goal in life is not to acquire things or people to complete me. Such goals are bound to cause suffering once they vanish — easy come, easy go. The journey is the essence of where life exists in all her glory. Goals are meaningless without the intermediary process to get me there. The journey is where my goals are formed and realised. I may find that in losing weight, I acquire certain skills or undertake several lifestyle changes which I previously would not have considered. Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
Successful people are adaptable. They know what they want and pursue it with intense determination. They are receptive to the process of life and do not have fixed outcomes on how their goals will be achieved. Our minds tend to daydream about the future state (or beat ourselves up for how we messed up in the past), instead of focusing on what we can do right now to improve. But if you shift your focus from the goal to the journey, your mindset completely changes. Instead of seeing a big goal as something that will be realized at some point in the distant future, you have smaller, bite-sized steps that you can look forward to, and more importantly, act on today. And these small steps carry a lot of weight. Big goals are scary. They’re intimidating. They stare you down. They swim in a sea, where glimpses of ideas and flickers of dreams float in the nebulous future of ‘someday’. When focusing on a big task, it’s easy to think the goal is everything. But it’s not. Because it’s not even about the goal. It’s about the journey.
The point is not to get better than others, it’s to get better than the old version of yourself. Break things down further each day by asking yourself, “What is one step I can take today to get closer to my goal?” You can add this routine to the end of the day as well by asking yourself, “What did I learn today?” You can also check in on a weekly or monthly basis to assess what you’ve gotten out of your journey thus far. Even if during the journey you don’t make significant improvements, walk the road anyway. You’re bound to learn things, meet new people and look back on the past with a smile on your face. Life takes us on unexpectedly. There are people you will meet who will do you good, there are friends who will walk away, and there are relationships that are never going to amount to anything. But we tend to leave our fingerprints behind when we touch someone’s life. Every person has learned something from someone. Our parents are our first teachers. We learn the basics of life through them. The internet is a platform where we interact with the world.
You have what it takes to make the most of work and life.
***I am wearing: Kidia Lace blazer by Bella Barnett, use code TLF15 for a 15% off on everything.
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