In this short audio, I compare the application of the laws of success to a young child trying to use the telephone.
Related article: Are you Making it Harder than it Needs to Be?
Background music: Fig Leaf Rag – distressed by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Source: incompetech.com/music/royalty-fre…isrc=USUAN1100702
Artist: incompetech.com/
TRANSCRIPT:
Goal achievement is like making a phone call: If you dial the numbers right, it works. Children who have never used a phone before will probably have trouble making it work right for a while, just as we can have trouble making the laws of success work to achieve our goals. It takes practice. We’re going to have set backs as we try to figure these things out.
When a goal doesn’t happen the way you expected, it’s so easy to get discouraged. Believe me. I’ve been there. I’ve lived that. I live it still, but I have learned that the laws of success are laws that you can depend on, and when things don’t work out quite the way you expected them to—according to the laws of success as you know them—then it’s time to learn something a little bit more about them. Ask the hard questions. Where did I go wrong? What more do I need to know? In what way am I making this harder than it has to be? For me this question, answer, new attempt process happened hundreds of times before I actually saw it really work even just once. I know hundreds of ways that the laws of success don’t work. Each failed attempt showed me something else that I needed to tweak about my approach.
Think about it. The first time a kindergartener tries to use the telephone chances are good that he or she will dial the number wrong. When that happens wouldn’t it be foolish to say that the phone doesn’t work? The phone works fine. The user just needs to be extra careful to dial all the right numbers, in the right order with no extra numbers inserted along the way.
And the laws of success work fine too. You’ve just got to be careful to dial all the right numbers, in the right order, and not insert any extra ones along the way. When you do it right, it unfailingly works the way it should. And the good news is that when you see it work once you gain confidence and eventually realize that it can work for you every time. In fact, it can become second nature, just like using the phone. Then after experiencing some success maybe you even discover that it can be even easier than that, like discovering the redial button or programming numbers into it with a one-touch.
But I do have some bad news. The one element that does not go away, no matter how slick you are or how smart you get, is the test to exercise faith when all appearances indicate impending disaster. Yes, no matter how good you get at the process and no matter how much you make you’ll always get plenty of opportunity to exercise faith, to make sacrifices, and to stretch yourself out of the comfort zone to accomplish the next goal. You just get to a point where you learn to accept the difficult nature of the process. The knowledge I share here does not advert the challenges. It just gives you the power to overcome them when they show up, the power to achieve the goal in spite of difficulty, the power to have peace of mind through the process. There’s value in that.
And yes, you can have your victory. You can have the money you need. You can find the job or succeeding business. You can have the freedom you seek. Just try again and learn from your mistakes.
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