What Are You Willing To Sacrifice For Success?

Daily Blog #269

We are three weeks into the new year. Only three weeks into a year, yet this is the time where many give up on their New Year’s resolutions and go back to living an ordinary life.

Maybe you are still going strong, and working to make your resolutions a part of your lifestyle. Or maybe you are like the majority of us who have already failed when it comes to accomplishing your New Year’s resolutions. And yes, I did say the majority of US.

It took me all of two and a half weeks to fail one of my New Year’s resolutions. To make matters worse, it was one of the resolutions that I was looking most forward to achieving. My number one resolution this year was to start podcasting twice a week. I thought that two times per week was a reasonable expectation, and one that would help to prevent any burnout. Well, let’s just say that I wasn’t even able to make this a manageable resolution for more than two weeks.

After dealing with an illness for several days, I found myself only having recorded one podcast episode for the entire week. I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t disappointed, but I knew that I was not going to be able to go back in time and change the past. And just like that, I realized that I failed. I failed at accomplishing my number one resolution only three weeks into the new year.

But the more I look at it, the more I realize that it doesn’t matter that I failed in completing one of my resolutions. It isn’t the failure that will determine my success. Instead, it’s what I do after I fail, and what I learned from my experiences that will determine my success. And in the end, at least I can say that I didn’t given up.

After trying to rush a podcast episode and upload something that I knew was less than mediocre, I realized that I had two options. I could either give up on myself and quit, or I could learn from my mistakes and better myself. Well, if you think that I am going to let one small hiccup stop me from chasing my dreams, then you are out of your damn mind.

The way I saw it, it wasn’t only as a learning experience for myself, but it was also a teaching opportunity. It would have been all too easy to quit. Instead, I took it as a sign that I needed to be more organized, more prepared, and I needed to have a stronger focus on the things that actually matter to me in life. I need to be willing to focus more on the things that I want to achieve if I actually want to achieve them.

Aside from that, I also wanted to use it as a teaching moment. There are going to be times in our lives when things are not going to go as we planned. There are also going to be times where we are going to experience bumps in the road. But that doesn’t mean that we should give up on our dreams. If we want to be successful with anything that we do in life, then we need to show tenacity and resilience.

Our natural habit is to give up once we experience the first taste of failure. Instead of embracing our struggles, learning from our mistakes, and trying to improve the next time around, we simply cave, quit, and give up. Just like that. Within a matter of seconds, we allow our minds to go from believing in our dreams, to losing all sense of hope. But what is that going to accomplish?

If you truly want to be successful, you need to be willing to ask yourself what it is that you are willing to sacrifice for success. Are you willing to fail, and fail often? Are you willing to dig deep and never quit on yourself or your dreams? And are you willing to sacrifice the things that don’t provide value to your dreams so that you can do the things that you have never been able to do?

We all have the opportunity to achieve whatever dream(s) it is that we set out to achieve. Are we going to have to make sacrifices? Yes. But if your dreams mean enough to you, and if you want to truly be successful, then you should have no problem making these sacrifices. So what are you willing to sacrifice for success?

Michael Bonnell

1/24/2019

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