Many people go through life not knowing what they want or what success looks like to them. Sadder than that, many people go through life working to someone else’s goal, to fulfil someone else’s dream. That’s ok, if you are a “go-with-the-flow kind of person”, but not ok if you actually want to be in control of your own destiny. Once you’ve managed to find your goal, there still is a heck of a lot of work to do to actually make it happen. As with most things, our mind gets in the way and creates barriers to our success - it’s a mechanism designed to protect us and keep us safe, but annoyingly, it also prevents us from taking bigger risks and making bigger leaps.  It puts the brakes on us choosing hard over easy, risk over safety, and effort over ease. This safety mechanism can manifest itself as lots of things (fear, blame, avoidance, excuses, and many more).

Ultimately, when pushing towards the goal, much of the success can be put down to two things:

1. Relentless focus on a plan A
2. No excuses

Relentless focus on a plan A

Much of what makes success happen is down to a relentless focus on plan A, at the expense of everything else. The most critical premise here is that every second invested in a plan B is time wasted.

Heard this one before?

“We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon...We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.”

John F. Kennedy in 1962 stating the USA’s intention to land a human on the moon. There wasn’t a plan B in that speech - it wasn’t “we choose to go to the moon, but if we don’t make it, we’ll happily settle for a trip to Aruba instead because the cocktails are better”. Dogged belief and determination towards a plan A makes plan A get closer.

Whatever barriers that come your way are part of the process. Overcoming them gets you closer to the dream. Spending time on something else simply won’t.

No excuses

There are about a squillion* ways to determine what your goal or dream might be, but sadly also a squillion* excuses that get in the way of actually doing it. The excuses range from “I don’t have time”, to “it’s too hard”, to “It’ll never happen”.  All of these are true if you choose to believe them, but we all have a choice to tackle these excuses head on. Let’s tackle the most common ones I tend to hear:

“I don’t have time”.

Now this one is my personal favourite. I just HATE hearing it. There is literally no-one on this planet who has any more time or less time than anyone else. What’s different between people is how they choose to use their time, or invest their time.  Sure, if you spend you night flicking through instagram or playing Candy Crush Saga or watching Tiger King on Netflix, then you won’t have time to learn a new language, work out at the gym in the hope of becoming Mr Universe, run a multi-million dollar construction industry, or train to become an actor.

“It’ll never happen”.

If you don’t invest any time or energy or effort, then you are right - it’ll never happen. You have close to zero chance of your dreams happening unless you are very very very very lucky.  If you apply even the slightest amount of energy and effort, then you stand a chance. And every single tiny improvement brings you one step closer to it actually happening. Even a 1% improvement every day over an extended period of time can deliver incredible results at the end. (Read Atomic Habits for a great example of how this works in practice).

“It’s too hard”.

Oh man. Everything is hard until it’s easy. If we all stopped with “It’s too hard”, then we wouldn’t have a COVID-19 vaccine right now, we wouldn’t have been to the moon, and we certainly wouldn’t of discovered DNA. With practice comes betterment. With continued activity comes flow.

*perhaps a slight exaggeration, but there are loads out there

What’s your plan A? What are your excuses?

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Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash