Decisions to Continue or Give Up
Left or Right
In every journey there are forks in the road where you must decide: continue or abandon it. You might see those forks in the road more often when you are first starting a new habit, skill, or passion.
Part of it is because you haven’t built enough momentum to sustain you through the difficult days when things don’t go the way you want them to. Part of it is because you don’t see where that journey is taking you and you’re not sure how much time you want to devote to it. It could turn out to be a dead end.
The fear of regret
Giving up is what a lot of people do. There are times where families or friends could be urging us to quit whatever it is we started. We could feel defeated in the small amount of progress we’ve made so far. We start feeling sorry for ourselves and get it in our head that we can’t become successful.
At times the best thing to do is look for a little motivation. Ask ourselves what if it does work out? Remind ourselves to take a deep breath, take a break and start again the next day. Our emotions can get the best of us which is why having a routine and building our self-discipline is important to becoming successful.
Most of us have a few people in our life that we have some influence on. It might be younger siblings, friends or even children. They are watching what we do more than we realize at times. It can be difficult to be a positive influence if we are saying one thing and doing another. Actions will speak louder than words. If we want to be that wonderful influence, we have to push ourselves to do the things we’ve set out to do.
Do you want to wake up one day knowing that the reason you didn’t do things because you gave up? You might be okay with it ending something and that’s okay. I know for myself I am okay with failing at things but giving up on them is not something that sits very well with me.
Accepting Shortcomings
Most people are born with an average amount of skill and intelligence. Most people must then learn how to survive and do things to get ahead in life. There are those who are born with natural talents, and some born as prodigies. Often when we look at those who are super successful in a field, we are pursuing we forget to look at the journey they took to get to where they are. The more time we spend looking at their journey, the more time we can learn various ways of becoming successful in that field.
Not every journey we take will lead to success. If it does for you, congratulations that is fantastic! For the rest of us, there will be disappointment. That doesn’t mean those disappointments didn’t teach us something that we can use later to become successful. The next time we start a journey we might be starting brand new, but we might have some experience that can transfer over to shorten our learning curve.
Alternative
We are human and a lot of us live where we have the decision to become whatever it is we want to be. It might not always be easy but that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible. You might not always go after what you want and that’s allowed. Just at some point you might be waking up not having gone for anything of the things you wanted to do in your life.
You can get stuck into a routine of doing the same things over and over. Life can be funny that way. You start working, living life and you lose track of where you wanted to go with your life. You stop making time to work on what you enjoy working on. You start feeling claustrophobic because it seems as if someone else is controlling your life.
Patience with the process
The more you work on your craft the better you will get. You will spend time tweaking certain elements of your craft. The more time you spend repeating certain aspects of your craft the faster you will get at crafting elements. The first couple of my blog posts took quite a while to write out what I needed for the blog post. This sixth post seems to have been written a lot easier. I am going to thank the processes that I’ve built for myself and the time that I’ve put into becoming a better writer.
As your skill set starts to evolve you start to become more confident with your craft. That self-confidence will start to bleed into your work as you push yourself to even more difficult techniques and creative projects. You will push boundaries you didn’t even consider where possible at one point in time.
It will be worth it
The longer you spend honing your craft the greater you will become. If you no longer want to chase whatever it is you were chasing that’s okay. Just do yourself a favor, make sure you are ending your journey because you are deciding to stop and not because you feel forced to. Take a deep breath, take a break, get some help, turn up the music and yell as loud as you can. That might be all you need to get your head back into the right frame of mind to succeed. Trust the process and the results will amaze you.
