perseverance | The Caleb Barney Collection

Practicing patience

The day you plant the seed is not the day you eat the fruit.

Most things in life that are worthwhile are either difficult to obtain, take effort, or take time to develop/grow. Some of the best things in life require all three. For example, having a strong relationship (whether between your spouse, best friend, or co-worker) takes time. You don’t have a deep relationship with them the first time you meet them. It takes effort on your part to listen, to show you care for them, etc. The longer you do this, the stronger your relationship grows.

The same can be said for physical success (building/shaping your body how you want it to look), mental (learning a new subject or language), financial (accumulating wealth), or at work (you have to start somewhere, and that place usually isn’t at the top). Most great things take time. We don’t plant the seed and eat the fruit the same day, just as we don’t do one workout and get a six pack the same day. The overnight success is the outlier.

Practice patience. Be patient with others, but be patient with yourself and your goals too. Don’t give up just because you’re not seeing results as quickly as you want. Eventually, if you are consistently working towards your goals, you can achieve great things. Just make sure you’re setting S.M.A.R.T. goals towards things that are actually meaningful to you. If you really want to achieve them, you’ll find a way. If not, you’ll find an excuse.

Building Resilience

Work on being resilient in all situations. No matter what happens, no matter the outcome, you can and will overcome it. When you fall down, you can choose to stay down and wallow in sorrow, or you can choose to get back up. Be a riser. Others can’t keep you down, only you get to make that choice.

Don’t overdramatize things. Something didn’t go your way…What is complaining going to do? Nothing. Learn from your mistakes. And if you feel you did everything “right” but it still didn’t work out, that doesn’t mean you need to make a bad decision next time because the good decision didn’t pay off this time/last time.

Common reasons why goals aren’t achieved

Why goals aren’t achieved?

1. Not enough focused time spent in action.

2. Give up after it doesn’t work once (instead of staying consistent and persistent).

3. Lacking discipline to do what is necessary.

4. Being easily discouraged after setbacks or slower progress than expected.

How do you view failure?

How do you view failure? Are you afraid of it? Is it something to be avoided at all costs?

I used to think about failure that way. It was my biggest fear. I didn’t want to look dumb by not knowing something, or by trying to do something and being inadequate at it. That was a nightmarish scenario in my mind.

But the more I read, the more I realized that life’s greatest entrepreneurs, the most innovative thinkers, and the people we often think of as the most outwardly successful all had one thing in common. All of them took chances and they all failed along the road to success.

Many of them “failed fast.” And that’s actually a strategy for a lot of successful people. Why take a year to fail at something when you can get the same lessons by failing within a couple of weeks? Fail quickly, make corrections, then try again. If you fail again, make more corrections and repeat.

You are more likely to see quicker progress (and, ultimately achieve your goal) if you fail quickly as opposed to slowly. There are many reasons for that, but I believe the two most important reasons are this:

1. You’re taking action. If you want to achieve something, take massive action. Most of us set too long of a timeframe to achieve our goals. We can accomplish them much quicker if we just take bigger, more frequent steps to get us towards our goals. You need to build momentum.

2. You feel more accomplished. It’s a little counterintuitive that you feel more accomplished after failing quickly, but hear me out. You’re taking action, moving (mostly) in the right direction over a short period of time. That feels way better than slowly doing something because you can see a tangible difference in where you are today versus where you were a week or two ago. Not only that, but say you move slowly and then realize after a year that whatever project you were working on wasn’t going to work. How unmotivating is that? You just “wasted” a year trying to do something when, if you would have taken massive action, you could have figured out in months? That’s rough.

Failure is a good thing as long as it doesn’t kill you (or your business) and you learn from it. Get back up after you’ve been knocked down. Try something new and you will be one step closer to your goal. One of my favorite quotes is from Denis Waitley. He said, “Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead-end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.” So go be somebody. Go do something. You’re only a failure if you either don’t try in the first place or if you quit.

Do you want to be an amateur or a professional?

Amateurs do what they want. They do what feels good or right at that particular moment in time. Amateurs don’t get paid. Professionals have a plan and follow it. They practice daily and they get compensated as a result.

Professionals are experts. They know what works and they put the majority of their efforts in the tried and true. Once they’ve mastered that, they’re willing to take calculated risks by branching out to try other ideas. But they don’t do this as it comes to them. Even when they are thinking outside the box, they plan and calculate before taking action. And all the while, they are still repeating the process that helped them become experts in the first place.

So next time you get bored or tired of doing what you know produces results, do it anyways. Follow a plan (or formulate one based on facts if you must) and stick to it. You’ll never gain traction if you keep switching from one idea to the next without rhyme or reason. Don’t be an amateur. Be a professional. Be an expert.