Sept. 19th, 2010
It’s quite possible that you need someone to pour a bucket of ice water over your head to wake you up! If you’re anything like me, you are probably guilty of forgetting how well positioned you are for success. It’s just so much easier to think about all of the things that are stressful, that are hard, and that you can’t control. This is an illusion: that we need to control things that we have no control over, and it may just be the ultimate form of self-sabotage. It is sabotage, because it wastes our energies. We can never reach our potential, or better yet, expand our potential, if we focus on the problems themselves.
How hard is it, honestly, to focus all of our energies on our anxieties? It’s not hard at all, really. The truth is: we don’t solve our problems by focusing on them. The more central our problems become to our psychology, the larger they become and the weaker we become. The solution to your current problem is probably completely foreign to the problem itself. You may, for example, be worried about making ends meet financially this month. Is the solution a strong focus on the problem you are agonizing over? No. The solution is to find creative and new ways to expand out into the world and increase your financial opportunities. When you expand, you do more than just create solutions for current problems. Expansion increases all opportunities. And so big problems become small as your potential becomes greater. Greater potential leads to greater action, which leads to greater confidence, which leads to greater potential, which leads to still greater action.
You are limited only by your perception of what is possible. Take it from someone who raised $15,000 in two weeks for something he believed in. Prior to thinking bigger, that might have taken me a quarter of a year or longer of hard work. Don’t get me wrong: I value hard work. The point is that hard work can raise our potential a little on its own, but we need to change the way we think to multiply our potential tenfold. Understand that $15,000 in two weeks is still small-fry stuff. Understand that Any value after the “$” is still just small-fry stuff. It is the power of vision that matters. Anything is possible, but we can only achieve what fits within our vision.
Often, the greatest struggle is for the crumbs that fall off of the table, for what beggar believes he is worthy of the feast on top? Very few have the courage to sit uprightly and take what is readily available to an earnest and confident character. But remember: to take, you must also give back in the form of vision. That requires more energy than begging. It requires assertion. How big is your vision?
- Austin S.
“The Freedom Skater”
Bonus Footage! For some reason, I feel the need to post some extremely old footage from May of 2009. Only a couple people have ever seen this footage. It’s from Switzerland. I was running down a mountain. There’s something about the mindset that it takes to run down a mountain that seems to fit with this post. Hold nothing back.
