A hungry lion started tracking the scent of a deer. As he followed the deer, he came across the scent of a rabbit. He turned aside and started going after the rabbit. Then he was distracted by the scent of a mouse and started following that. He finally came to the hole into which the mouse had vanished. He ended the day hungrier than he had started it. This fable illustrates how many spend their lives distracted with this or that, and at the end of the day, week, month and year– they have accomplished little.
Our brains behave like a football filled with bees. Hundreds of conflicting impulses, pushing us in different directions.
People never want to do one thing. We want to do all the things. We simultaneously want to get married, and to own a new company and to travel round the world. Our desires are countless, independent agents, working to nudge our football in their own selfish direction.
And so usually, that ball is going nowhere.It’s controlled more by the terrain than by the will of what’s inside it.This is how most of us live our lives. We feel endlessly conflicted. We never have enough time. And what happens to us is stronger than our ability to combat it.
Imagine if 20 years ago you were a genius who had the idea of starting up Google, Amazon, Eskom, Shoprite, Globacom and Facebook. You just invented six of the best business ideas of the last and present century, and if you had started any one of them you could now be worth billions. But if you were determined to do all six simultaneously, you’d be absolutely nowhere. Hmmm!
It’s not enough to have great ideas. Lots of people have great ideas. The problem is that too many great ideas cancel each other out. Leadership doesn’t work in volume. The more directions you’re being pulled in, the less distance you’ll travel.
HOW CAN WE POSSIBLY ACHIEVE THE IMPOSSIBLE? Imagine an insanely ambitious goal for yourself. Say you want to write a book, or own a multinational business or company.
If you absolutely had to do that – if your life and the lives of everybody you cared about depended upon it – how would you? How could you?
You’d simply drop everything else. You’d become like one giant bee pushing in one direction, and you’d move very, very quickly.
Monomaniacal focus on a single goal is perhaps the ultimate success stratagem. It’s a pattern found in everyone from Moses to Joshua to Edison to Einstein. When we are able to focus on a single goal, constantly, our achievements reach their theoretical limit:
Most people aren’t failing because of lack of potential. They’re failing because their potential is spread in too many directions.You will always want to attempt more than you can achieve.
Unfortunately pulling yourself in too many directions is the single quickest way to ensure failure. And putting your all into a single direction is the quickest way to ensure success.
The few people who have achieved the most staggering, extraordinary world changing feats with their lives didn’t do so by dividing their intentions. They aimed high, got their honeybees in line, and said no to all the other hypothetical opportunities that life presented them, for now.
If you want the power to follow your dreams, you have to say no to all the alternatives.
FOLLOW YOUR DREAM TILL YOU GET TO ITS ROOT.
Read Philippians 3:12-16
No comments:
Post a Comment