“Lace ‘em up every day and pretty soon you win.  Stop listening to other people’s journeys and focus on your own,” David Goggins.  Another reminder to put in the work.  But this isn’t the work of the 9-5, this is about the focus and dedication to our creativity, passion, dreams, and purpose.  When we do the work and it is focused in those areas, we make real progress and create momentum.  We’ve talked many times about focus and energy—energy (intention) flows where focus goes.  So when we learn how adaptable we are, we understand that we are able to do anything.  We spoke earlier this week about another David Goggins quote, “When the mind won’t quite, the body will adapt.”  It doesn’t matter what the goal is as long as we go after it with complete focus.  The bottom line is to do the work.  The mind is what needs to be controlled because once we establish what we want and that we can do the work, then nothing else gets in the way.  The body will adapt, the soul will open up, the steps will be revealed. 

As humans we naturally compare ourselves to others.  It’s engrained in us—we need it for survival to a degree because if someone is doing something that gets them a different result then we want to be able to do the same thing.  From a survival instinct aspect, we need to know as many ways to get out of danger as possible.  It just so happens that we interpret danger as being different.  Aside from societal repercussions of that interpretation, we have become a detriment to ourselves because we don’t take our focus off of what’s happening with other people.  We need to focus on our own house before we can move forward.  Just because we like the way the exterior looks doesn’t mean we know everything about the function inside.  It can look pretty on the outside and be a complete disaster inside.  All we can do is take control of our own story and work on filling those pages.

I know not everyone is ready for a massive overhaul like that and learning to accept where we are in order to get where we want to go can be daunting no matter what.  The overall point from Goggins is that no mater what the goal or destination, we need to do the work.  The beginning always looks the same for all of us: take the first step.  Once we do that and maintain our course, the rest unfolds.  There isn’t really a big trick to this, but as we’ve spoken about, simple doesn’t mean easy.  It is real work to break down old habits and beliefs.  It’s real work to start doing something new.  Shifting our mindset and removing old beliefs not only takes time to reprogram but time to actually believe something new.  It takes learning to let go of discouragement (see the story about the rake of discouragement) and understanding that the process we have to follow may not be what we thought it would be.  Another lesson in letting go—stubborn on the goal, flexible on the how.  Just remember, no matter what it looks like, taking any step forward is a win.  Some days it’s a win to put our shoes on and soon we learn to tie them and then we are running.  Just do the work and we can’t go wrong.