Rabindranath Tagore
How simple and obvious the above seems, and how hard it is sometimes to achieve. If you want to cross the sea, you can't do it by looking at the ocean. Steps and action must be taken. Dreaming of crossing the sea won't get you from New York to Southampton, no matter how hard you visualize it. You actually have to cross!
In my personal life, I've often been the "victim" (can one truly be a victim if the victimization is self-inflicted?) of fantastic planning followed by piss-poor execution. Of course, to reach a goal one needs a plan, but if you don't follow the plan and do the work, you get nowhere.
For years, I had a dream of writing a novel. But until I sat down at the keyboard and actually typed the words, the dream was just that: a fantasy, a pleasant diversion, a "someday" thought. But then I got to work, and in a month, I had a first draft.
I don't know exactly what kept me from doing the work. I assume it was a number of things, including some fear, as well as laziness and a lack of self-discipline. But the truth has been knocked into me lately: If I want to reach the goals, I have to do the work -- even the hard, distasteful stuff that I sometimes dread.
As the old saying goes, "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." If we take that first step, then follow it with another, then another after that, and so on, pretty soon we can look back in amazement at the progress we've made -- and that goal, that dream, that "someday" will be closer than we ever imagined.
1 comment:
You'll get there!
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