Featured Image Credit: Massimo Sartirana on Unsplash
Imagine working your entire life toward a goal, never reaching it. Years of fighting, grinding, and commitment. Decades of dedication.
To fall short after so much time and energy. Uncertainty plagues your every choice. Suddenly you are back where it all began.
Is your effort going to get you to the goal?
Think about Olympians. You train for years for an opportunity to compete for literal minutes, if not seconds.
The World’s Fastest Person, Usain Bolt, trained for years to run only seconds in the Olympics. What about those who didn’t win? What about those who didn’t make the team?
What about the people who made it only to fall apart n the spotlight? Years spent training the same routines and races, only to slip and fall at the worst possible moment.
There are thousands of hours of athletes making mistakes in important games. An error in baseball allows the opposing team to win.
A dropped pass in Football. A poor shot right in front of goal with the game on the line.
No motivational coach will tell you your effort may not be enough.
You can attend every audition. You can travel to Hollywood with the thousands who flock there every day. You can train with the best acting coaches and never make a living as an actor.
You can train for professional sports your entire life, excel in college, and flame out. There is no shortage of top draft picks who fail to succeed professionally.
In America, every competition has a winner. Someone celebrates at the end.
In Ninja Warrior, a Japanese competition, winning is no guarantee. If competitors failed to pass the course, they lost. If no one made it, the show was over. No winner.
I always thought it was the perfect analogy for life. We would attain our goal in a book or movie and be happy forever. However, in real life, we may not achieve your goal. Yet, there are three important reasons to pursue the goal no matter the result.
No Doubt About It
One of the worst things to have is doubt. As your life focuses, looking back and having what if’s is the worst pain.
People would rather regret doing something and failing than regret never attempting. The biggest regrets people have not tried. I always wondered if you could have succeeded.
Suppose you achieved your long-suffering dream. After all, there are stories. The story of Thomas Edison and the 10,000 tries to make a lightbulb.
Stories of legendary American writer Stephen King getting rejected 30 times. The book rejected became one of the best-selling books in history, Carrie.
You also gain another powerful attribute. There is power in the pain of effort. Even if it doesn’t materialize, it eliminates the doubt.
Who You Become
“What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.” – Zig Ziglar.
Think about the things you’ve done. Think about little goals if you’re younger and don’t have those BIG moments.
How hard did you work? Did you have to change habits? Did you need to learn something new?
When the goal becomes the sole focus, it can deflate not to reach that feeling of success. However, simply the attempt, a genuine attempt, forces you to become so much better than you were.
You become stronger. Smarter. The experiences gained are invaluable.
It’s easy to remark on the attempt as a failure. But you are now a different person, with different capabilities.
And that leads to the last point.
What You Can Accomplish
I hear it constantly from my son, his cousins, and some friends: I can’t do that.
We attended a Fourth of July celebration downtown. We walked down to the main strip, where everyone set up to watch the show. We had to park what was, in reality, a mile away.
We put our chairs down and waited. In the meantime, my son found a new friend. They played with some glowsticks and ran around for about an hour.
After the fireworks show, my son complained he couldn’t make it. His legs were too tired.
We often can do far more than our minds believe we can.
When you push yourself hard, you can discover your boundaries, not where you believe them to exist.
You’ll go farther than you may have thought possible in the pursuit.
What’s Next?
Life is at risk. We are not living in a movie where everything ends with reaching our goal. There is no guarantee our effort will pay off.
We all struggle, and we all make mistakes. Even missing your ultimate goals can lead to benefits.
It alleviates any doubts you’ll have later in life. One painful experience is never knowing if you could have made it.
By trying your best to push through, you will know if you had what you needed.
Who we become is another benefit of this effort. To reach the highest goals, you have to become a better person.
More strength, more intelligence, and more experience.
You also reveal just how much you can do. It is easy to underestimate what we can accomplish. Put to the test; we often exceed what we believe we can do.
You may encounter doubts. Do not stop. Some stop short of reaching their goals; others won’t make it. It is still worth pursuing.
How far can you take it?