I realized recently that I, like many others around me, have been waiting for someone to just give us that magical sentence, procedure, or technique that will make it all work perfectly. But the problem is :
a) there is no right way
and
b) there is no such person to deliver this message to you
Take my friend for example. One of her regional managers came to the office over several weeks to watch how she was selling. She wasn’t very excited to seeing him show up after the first week. When I questioned her as to why, she said that he wasn’t giving her what she thought he should be giving her, which was the right phrases to increase her selling power. When I told her that wasn’t his role, she just shrugged.
This isn’t the first time that she has issues with selling certain products because she’s waiting for someone to give her the magic recipe to sell that particular product. She wants to go to classes and seminars. Instead of just getting in there and learning through doing, through failing, she wants that security of knowing that if she gets the magical formula then there will be 100% success. Notice anything wrong with this mentality? Are you guilty of this belief yourself?
Fear of failure is surely a great fear in our modern society. To the point that we aren’t capable of doing a damn thing. We’d rather sit and watch life pass us by wondering why we aren’t getting ahead, why that guy over there is all but rolling in gold and we can’t seem to pay our water bill. Well, no wonder, if this is your perspective.
I’ve been guilty of this myself. Often. I write from long standing experience. I’m an information hound and gobble up books and book and books on information about everything from running, to cooking to how to clean my house. My husband is the opposite. He gets in there and just does it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Failure rolls off him like water off a duck’s back. No sweat. No personal emotional bashing. He just gets up, dusts himself off and starts again.
In the past, I would keep putting off starting a new project because I felt that I wasn’t knowledgeable enough in the area to take real action. I needed some more help from the “experts” before I made my first move, which could be deadly if I don’t read more first! My husband doesn’t read anything. He gets a spark to try something and he implements immediately. He is definitely of the ready-fire-fire-aim method of getting things done. I, of course, used to spend great amounts of time just ready-aiming-ready-aiming-ready-aiming.
This blog, this website, is all a result of finally figuring out this User’s Manual for Success. It’s the ready-fire-aim-fire-ready-fire technique that should be your manual as well.
Let me use this site as an example. This site isn’t perfect. I don’t know much about webmastering. I’m learning as I go. The longer I sit and try to figure out most of the stuff that I don’t understand nothing gets done. As a matter of fact, I bought the package to build the website on December 31, 2009. I put up my homepage at the end of June of 2010! And then it took me at least a month to get any other pages up! I dragged my feet because the information I was learning felt overwhelming and I started to doubt myself.
But when I finally realized that I had to just “take some action”, I got the ball rolling and the site started to take form. I had a breakthrough moment when I realized that I had to build this site because I could no longer deny being my true self. That true me is a writer. A website and blog are today’s medium for channeling this desire into an incoming/full-time job outlet.
So I had to take on the motto of : decide on a next action, any action (aim), ‘throw something up then go back and tweak it later, (fire-aim). I found this to be the key to getting that snowball effect into motion.
Here’s what else I learned from this:
- Something actually got done. It’s not perfect, but nothing really is. So drop the perfectionist attitude.
- Because I’ve attempted it in real time, I understand it better and I can “fix” things quicker. What seemed to be Greek or Chinese, now isn’t that difficult to grasp. This is due to the fact I now have a concrete working example to bounce the information off of and compare to.
- This builds confidence in myself to take action in the earlier learning stages for new areas of the website.
- It keeps the project in motion.
- This builds more self-esteem because I’m making progress on something that means a great deal to me.
- The further I move forward in building the website, the easier it is to see the illusionary unsurmountable mountains that my fear-based ego was throwing my way. The more I progress and move forward on the project, the better hind-sight vision I get.
- This better hind-sight helps to cull out future illusions that my ego keeps throwing my way. I know I can do it one action at a time.
- I see that it’s all about the Law of Attraction. See the finished project, live the finished product and the “hows” will work themselves out along the way. It’s almost a fake-it-til-you-make it scenario. But I got the feeling of being a full-time blogger and webmaster first.
The User’s Manual to Success is simple and unique. You cannot buy it in a store or through reading this blog entry. The User’s Manual to Success is this:
Face what you fear then take some action on it even before you can see the final result. Assess and reassess. Then take some more action. Repeat.
That’s it.
A note of precaution: Do not attribute good or bad/right or wrong to your person for any actions taken. Do not associate your personal emotions with the actions. Assess from an outsider’s viewpoint, like a scientist assessing the lab results. Keep your emotions out of it.
Remember that one action will give you faster or better results while others will give you fewer results. All results are good because they all tell how to do it or how not to do it. Only your experience can tell you this.
Success is a feeling. A feeling comes from action taken or action not taken. You either feel like you’re succeeding at something or you feel like you’re not succeeding at something. Taking action is what pushes the odds in your favor. Keep taking action and you will start to feel successful.
If this isn’t enough, remember that the greatest names in history all failed and all failed many times. Thomas Edison is the most commonly referenced person for continuing in the face of failure. He is said to have failed something like 25,000 tries in making the battery or light bulb. But he didn’t citizen himself. He just realized that he had 24,999 ways of knowing how not to make a battery or light bulb.
Other great names who failed over and over: Abraham Lincoln, Henry Ford and Walt Disney. Glad they didn’t give up? Me too.