Step 4 – Never Give Up
How many times will a baby try to take its first step before it gives up?
A baby doesn’t know how to give up. A baby doesn’t know the difference between success and failure. It doesn’t understand self-discipline. It doesn’t know anything about courage. All a baby knows is what it wants, and it keeps going until it gets it. What if you had the same approach to life?
Getting what you want boils down to a single word: persistence. No matter how presentable your wish, how good your plan, how tireless your work, your success will ultimately hinge on persistence. Are you willing to go the distance? Then you will succeed. Are you willing to endure when others are ready to quit? Then you will succeed. Are you willing to pursue until you get it, however long it takes? Then you will succeed. Success belongs to those who refuse to settle for less. Persist until you get what you want, and you will always get what you want.
Next to persistence, your skills, intelligence, and talents amount to little. The most skillful person who gives up will always finish behind the most inept person who does not. The most intelligent person who gives up will always finish behind the most simple-minded person who does not. The most talented person who gives up will always finish behind the least talented person who does not. The most gifted person alive, if he or she gives up, will always finish behind someone—behind anyone who does not.
Belief
The most common reason we give up is that we no longer believe in what we’re doing. Either we don’t believe our effort can succeed or we don’t believe that success is worth our effort. Either way, once we lose our belief, we lose our will to continue.
And who can blame us? Why should we plant a garden unless we believe it will bear vegetables? Why should we build a house unless we believe it will provide shelter? Why should we undertake personal sacrifice unless we believe that our efforts have a chance of succeeding? Without belief, there will be no effort. Without effort, there will be no results.
Belief is the foundation of persistence. Without belief, you have no reason to complete a task. But with belief, you have no reason to quit.
Whenever you find yourself tempted to give up on a wish, ask yourself these questions:
1. Do I believe I can make this wish come true?
2. Do I believe this wish is worth the effort?
If either answer is no, then you need to work on your belief before you can effectively work on your wish. Belief causes persistence. Persistence causes success.
Wish Destroyers
By now, you’ve locked on to your wish; you’re taking the appropriate action; you’re managing your progress; and you’re ready to persist in your efforts until you make your wish come true.
But there may yet be forces at work inside you that can make it difficult or even impossible for you to succeed. These are called wish destroyers because left unmanaged that is exactly what they will do.
Fear
The first wish killer is fear. Fear is a negative wish. The more you focus on what you fear, the more likely you are to make it happen.
The human mind does not distinguish between a mental picture of something you want and a mental picture of something you are trying to avoid. The more clearly you picture what you want, the harder your mind will work to give it to you. The more clearly you picture what you’re trying to avoid, the harder your mind will work to give you that instead. Whatever you consistently picture on the inside, your mind will do its best to reproduce on the outside. Unless you want to make your fears come true, think of something else.
When you’re afraid, the movie you’re running in your mind is likely to be a gut-wrenching feature presentation of what you fear. You react to that movie the same way you react to a good horror movie—with sweaty palms, a churning stomach, and a racing heart. Change the movie, and you change your reaction.
For example, what would you do if you found yourself watching an unpleasant show on TV? You would change the channel. Right? You can do exactly the same thing when you find yourself watching an unpleasant show in your mind: you can change the channel and watch something else.
When you’re afraid of something, you’re picturing what can go wrong. If you want to change the channel, picture what can go right. Instead of picturing the worst thing that can happen, picture the best thing that can happen. Instead of picturing the pain, picture the gain. Instead of picturing what you have to lose, picture what you have to win.
When you change the movie you’re watching in your mind, you change your emotional reaction to it. You turn your fear into excitement, your dread into anticipation, your avoidance into action. You can accomplish all of this simply by changing your mental pictures.
Thinking like a victim
Another wish killer is to think like a victim. As Webster’s defines it, a victim is “someone harmed by or suffering from some act, condition, or circumstance.”
Do you know anyone who doesn’t fit that description? We are all victimized by something—crime, poverty, discrimination, a handicap, a broken home, a lousy boss, or fly-away hair. But the only real victim is the person who thinks like one.
Life is like a self-service gas station. You can sit in your car and honk, or you can fill the tank yourself. No one honks longer, louder, or with less effect than a victim.
It’s easy to think like a victim. For one thing, it feels good. It lets you off the hook. When you’re not responsible for what happens to you, you can’t be expected to do anything about it. When the cards are stacked against you, you have no choice but to fold, so you never have to face the pressure of playing to win. And you never lack for something to do. You can fill every idle moment with the bittersweet memories of your misfortunes. And unfortunately, you can never fulfill a wish.
When you think like a victim, you turn yourself from a cause into an effect. Nothing will kill a wish faster than that. When you blame the world, you lose your power to change it. In the name of what you can’t fix, you sacrifice the things you can fix.
It’s not what happens to you that matters in life, it’s what you choose to do about it. We are all victims of forces beyond our control. The people who get what they want from life focus on the forces they can control. They choose to live as a cause instead of as an effect.
If you want to be a cause in your own life, don’t think like an effect. Instead of worrying about the cards you’ve been dealt, play them. Instead of asking, “Why me?” ask, What am I going to do about it? Instead of feeling sorry for yourself, refuse to settle for less than what you want.
The world owes you only what you are willing to collect. The best way to collect is to make your wishes come true and achieve your goals.
The Myth of Self-Discipline
Success flows from passion, not from self-discipline. While self-discipline is important, it is not the key factor to achieving your goals and making your wish come true. Self-discipline is the foundation of character, and character is the foundation of all lasting success. News headlines and history books are full of people who fell from grace because they lacked character. Without character, success is meaningless.
But character is only the launching pad—it’s not the rocket. The rocket is passion.
Successful people do what they need to do whether they like it or not. That’s self-discipline. Exceptionally successful people do what they need to do because they love it. That’s passion.
If you have to force yourself to make your wish come true, you’re working on the wrong wish. Look around you. The people who are incredibly successful aren’t doing what they hate; they’re doing what they love. Or at least they’ve learned to love what they’re doing.
It’s easy to fall ion love with an effect—we all want to be rich or famous, or to make a difference in the world—the trick is to fall in love with the cause. The people most likely to become successful are the ones who fall in love with the processes that cause their success. Fall in love with the cause, and the effect will take care of itself.
When you’re in love with the cause, you’re following the path of least resistance. Your actions come naturally. You don’t have to discipline yourself; you don’t have to force yourself; you don’t even have to motivate yourself. You simply do what you enjoy doing. The doing then becomes its own reward, and your desired results follow the way dessert follows a great meal.
The easiest way to substitute passion for self-discipline is to change the way you think about what you’re doing. Instead of asking yourself, “How can I get myself to do this?” ask yourself, How can I get myself to enjoy doing this? The secret to joy is to find it wherever you look, and to look for it everywhere. Look for it in the tasks that will make your wish come true. Look for it in the challenges you face and problems you have to solve. Look for it in the moment.
Don’t try to talk yourself into feeling this joy; imagine yourself into it instead. Change your mental movie. Enlarge your comfort zone. Instead of running a movie that shows how much you hate what you’re doing, run a movie that shows how much you love it. Picture how much you enjoy doing the things that will make you achieve your goal, and before long you’ll enjoy doing them.
Patience
It may be one of the world’s oldest clichés, but patience really is a virtue. Our greatest achievements are accomplished over time, with considerable dedication and perseverance. Neither of these qualities would be possible without patience. “Good things comes to him who waits,” as the old saying goes. The secret to waiting is patience.
Patience is the ability to wait for an outcome, instead of insisting on having that outcome at once. Patience is the ability to bide your time while all the forces that you cannot control align themselves to help you accomplish what you cannot do alone. To cure the affliction called instant gratification, all we need to do is develop patience. But how?
We can start by realizing that patience is not just a virtue, it’s a skill. Moreover, it’s a learnable skill, a skill that can be mastered by anyone. And patience is one of life’s most enjoyable skills because it allows you to relax, to regain your self-control, to restore a sense of well-being and balance—even in the midst of chaos.
Patience allows you to rise above the turmoil and confusion of a hectic life and understand that there are forces at work far beyond what you alone can master. If you’re willing to wait for these forces—in other words, if you’re patient—they can be made to work for you, instead of against you.
But how do you learn patience? The same way you learned every other skill you now possess: through practice. Specifically, you practice waiting.
The next time you have to wait for something, think of it as practice. Think of it not as a waste of time but as a way to use time to your advantage. Think of it as if you’ve been given a chance to develop a skill that, once mastered, will bring you the kind of joy and peace of mind that otherwise you could only dream about.
Once you embrace patience as a source of strength in making your wishes come true, and you embrace waiting as a way to develop that strength, then delays will only encourage you, setbacks will only strengthen you, and time—perhaps for the first time in your life—will finally be on your side.
Conclusion
Now that you know your own strength; now that you know how to make your own wishes come true; what are you going to do about it?
Are you going to make your wishes come true and start achieving your goals, or are you going to settle for something less? Are you going to take the strategies we discussed and turn them into a habit that can bring you literally anything you want for the rest of your life? Or are you going to let the next ten years pass the way the last ten did? There is nothing wrong with that, as long as you don’t mind being in the same place ten years from now that you are today.
If you want to make your wishes come true, you have a decision to make. You have to decide whether you want to be a cause or an effect. You have to decide whether you want to be a screwdriver or a screw. You have to decide whether, when you are finished with this book, you are willing to set in motion the causes of whatever effects you desire.
Just remember, only you can make that one choice that makes everything else possible.
