How many times have you set out to reach a goal with the best of intentions, only to give up before you got there? When you think back, do you ever wonder where you'd be now if you'd done it? What if you gave up when you were only three steps away from making it happen? What would you change if you could go back in time to make sure you took those last three steps?
In his famous book Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill tells a true story about a man named R. U. Darby and his uncle who got "gold fever" during the gold rush.
After sending their first car of ore to a smelter, they found out that they had found one of the best places in Colorado to find gold. They kept digging with excitement, but the ore vein disappeared.
They kept digging in hopes of finding the vein again, but when they didn't, they gave up and sold their equipment.
The man who bought the equipment knew that digging around randomly wasn't the best way to find the vein. He asked a mining engineer to come over and do some math.
Darby and his uncle failed because they didn't know anything about "fault lines" and didn't think of any other options. With his expert knowledge, the engineer was able to say that the gold vein would be three feet from where the Darbys stopped digging, and he was right.
Millions of dollars worth of gold were taken out of the mine by a man who didn't give up easily and brought in someone who knew more than he did.
The lesson is that success is often just around the corner from what seems to be your biggest problem. Accept failure and use it as a way to measure your progress. When you lose, try to learn something from it. What do you need to change about how you work, how you think, or where you live?
I've been working with a personal trainer for a few months, which is a modern example. During our first few meetings, she asked me to do things that I thought were impossible.
I was only lifting average weights, and because I'm small, I thought that "small results" were the best I could hope for. When she told me to do calf raises with 50 pounds on my back, I moaned and grunted and told her it couldn't be done. I wanted to stop after four reps, but she said, "If you can do four, you can do six. Do two more."
The first week I used the leg press, she had me lift up to 100 pounds. I thought my head was going to explode, so I asked her if she went to a school for sadists.
She eventually stopped telling me what weight she was setting the machines at and kept increasing the weights and the number of reps. I had no idea, so I told her after two weeks, "Ha! Calf raises with 50 pounds are easy, so let's increase the weight."
She then told me, "Laurie, for the last two sessions, you've been lifting 80 pounds."
She also had me leg press 180 pounds without telling me in the third week.
By the end of the fourth week, I could do 100-pound calf raises and 200-pound leg presses. She did the same thing with my upper body exercises, and I was lifting weights I would never have let myself try.
I would have stayed at the level I had set for myself because of a short-term loss and a narrow way of thinking. She thought about things in a bigger way and taught me ways to push harder, lift more, and get stronger.
I used this lesson to change how I think about business, and I'd like you to do the same.
The only limits you have are the ones you put on yourself. Losing is just something that happens. Measure the results, change how you're doing things, and keep going.
2006 (c) Laurie Hayes - HBB Source
