Have you ever felt like you just wanted to create the results you want in life, right now? As in, “I don’t want to wait – I have a general idea of what I want and just want to create it and enjoy the benefits I believe it will deliver to me, right now!”. I believe that all of us feel like this a lot in our lives, but the truth is, we need to prepare for the road ahead of creating the results and success that we desire.
Creating Results In Life Takes Time
I’m not here to say that certain dreams, goals or desires will take a certain amount of time. I don’t have the unlimited wisdom in order to determine how people reach their dreams in life. What I can tell you is that what you believe to be true about your goals will greatly influence the way in which you achieve them.
For example: there was probably a period of time in your life where learning how to tie your shoe laces together was the biggest goal imaginable. Now, where does learning how to tie shoes score on your priorities for things to learn, accomplish and achieve in life?
Once you learned how to tie your shoes, you most likely quickly made it into a habit. At first, you probably tied your shoe laces 30 times per hour in order to feel how good it felt to know that you learned a new skill that you’ve been trying to develop. You probably tied your shoe laces for all of the world to see many times over. Eventually you also learned that you couldn’t walk without tripping over your shoes unless those laces were tied. So what did you do about this? You made tying your shoes together a daily habit and a part of your routine. These days, I doubt you’d approach tying your shoes with the same enthusiasm as you did when you first learned. While you were still little, you’ve recognized that tying your shoes is an important part of everyday living and comfort so you took the time to incorporate it into a habit. After thousands of hours of practice, it comes effortlessly – but just remember that this effortless tying of your shoe laces that you enjoy today didn’t come so easily and naturally to you while you were still little and learning how to do it.
The point is that it took time to learn and develop this skill. The more excited you were about learning how to do this, the more time and practice you were willing to dedicate to learning how to tie your shoe laces. Most likely you could have learned alongside a group of friends of a similar age which could have even sparked a little bit of competition.
At the end of the day, it took a certain amount of time to learn this skill. The feeling of “wanting it now” can sometimes help us to create things faster in life, since it’s a natural flow and channel of Willpower, however, we must be careful that these feelings of “wanting it now” aren’t accompanied by a feeling of lack, despair or abandonment. Let’s think about the tying of shoe laces analogy again. Let’s consider some of the different types of children and how they approach learning to tie their shoes:
- The child who is passionate about learning how to tie shoes that possesses a natural curisoity.
- The child who is pressured into learning how to tie their shoes because the other “grown ups” around them all say that they should know how to do it by now.
- The child who wants to learn how to tie their shoes but just feels as though they don’t know how, can never learn and feel as though they can’t ask anybody for help because they are afraid of the criticism that they might receive.
- The child who is trying to learn how to tie their shoes but becomes easily frustrated, disappointed and let down whenever he experiences a failure. His attempts are filled with anger at himself, the shoe laces and the people who are trying to teach him how to do it correctly.
- The child who is afraid to even begin to learn how to tie their shoes. This can be for any reason – maybe they are filled with fear in general, are afraid they will do it wrong or maybe they are even afraid that they will do it right. The child who is afraid that he/she will do it right is usually paralyzed by the fear of not knowing what’s “next” after they are successful.
Do the stories of these children sound familiar to you? They truly echo and reflect back to us the roots of personal development.
Before You Can Create Results & Success – Understand That It Takes Time
Any goal that is worthy of yourself, your skills, talents and abilities is probably going to be a goal that doesn’t happen over night. It’s important to try and visualize what you are wanting to accomplish and see how this is true. For example, I’d love to have this website become the biggest personal development site and resource on the Internet. I know that isn’t going to happen by tomorrow (although there is a slight chance, it’s still largely improbable). However, I understand that I can largely influence how fast that this does happen by examining some of the factors I have control over such as:
- How many articles I write per day
- How much time I spend promoting this personal development blog to others
- Making sure I create content that others would want to read/link to
And I can also setup smaller goals and plan for smaller milestones that act as smaller “successes” that help me to know I’m moving towards my larger goal that will help to keep me motivated. Some examples include:
- How many visitors per day I am getting
- The percentage increase in my traffic from month to month
If any of these things stay still or begin to slid backwards, I know that I am not doing the amount of work necessary in order to achieve my goals. It’s all about understanding that these truly big, mind-blowing dreams are not built all at once. Like the construction of any building, it is built piece by piece at a time. I know the work I do today that will help me to better understand new concepts (such as learning to tie shoe laces) will come in better handy for tomorrow while working on bigger goals (perhaps the child went on to become somebody who climbs Mt. Everest and thus had to become an expert at learning how to tie certain knots and using equipment that people trust with their lives to help them reach the top).
While you are creating or working towards any goal in life, it’s important to know and truly understand the following and believe in it:
- My goal will have periods of ups and downs, and I am prepared to face the challenging times and move into them. I understand that I can only overcome my fear of something by deliberately throwing myself into it, figuring it out, and mastering it. By doing this, I develop a stronger and stronger Willpower until those things that I once feared become easy-to-do habits, such as tying shoe laces.
- Everything happens one step at a time, and I should identify the things that I can easily do and then break them up into even smaller steps and do them little by little as I see fit. Eventually, as I master newer and better things, I can increase myself in a way that doesn’t cause a “burn out”.
- I will identify smaller marks of success that I will use in order to keep my spirits high. These smaller successes will tell me that I am moving forward in the right direction. Discipline
- If I am repeatedly trying something and not being successful with it, then I need to be honest with myself and ask if this is something that I truly feel is right for me and want for myself. Passion/Willpower is often the greatest driving force that we have access to as humans. It gives us access to a certain quality of inner-strength and energy that can only be activated and tapped into while we are coming from a deep place of Passion. Without this energy, we must be willing to accept that we are only bringing a fraction of our true potential to the table.
My last piece of advice is this:
It’s OK to allow some things to take time to develop fully the way you would like them to. The skills you are using and learning today can be applied to bigger and better things tomorrow. This is why it’s important to give yourself fully and completely 100% to everything that you are doing in life right now; you never know how what you learn will be of vital importance and use to your goals and dreams tomorrow.
The most important thing is to just apply the knowledge that you gain through your experiences in life towards the things you are most passionate about. Your Passion is your Willpower which is your gateway into unlimited potential in life.