You start in on the wall, laying one stone at a time, fitting them together, not perfectly, but soundly. It starts to seem like its taking an awfully long time. Longer than you thought it would. You aren't even a third of the way around the property! You start to think you must be nuts.
Your back is getting sore, your hands are developing calluses. Some days, it rains and you get even less done. Some days, the weather is perfect and it seems like you could lay stone forever.
Then, there's a huge storm. Gusty winds knock a huge tree over. Right into your wall. A good portion of it is crumbled. You're devastated.
Meanwhile inside the house, laundry is piling up, your wife says she doesn't see you enough, and the people are your real-life-job are starting to question why you're always so tired you can't even operate the coffee pot lately.
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| How about that beard though?! |
This is the part, where most people quit. They tell themselves, eh, its not worth it, who needs a wall, it was silly anyways, there's no point. On to more important things.
The wall never gets finished. Neither does that car in your garage. You didn't lose those 20 lbs off your middle. Your great plan to redecorate the front bedroom resulted in three streaks of sample paint on the wall before you made up that excuse as to why it didn't NEED redoing.
We all do it. We all start things and don't finish them. And perhaps some things SHOULDN'T be finished. (Like that robot you were working on to clean the toilets. Isn't that why you had kids?)
But for the most part, the ONLY way to finish something, is to continue to do it in the first place. If you just kept laying one stone at a time, even if you slowed your pace, you'd have NO CHOICE but to meet your goal of finishing. It would manifest itself.
Consistency. That's the word of the day. Whatever goal you have will NEVER be met without it. Even when you encounter setbacks, and it seems IMPOSSIBLE, you must keep throwing rocks on the pile. When you stop, you ENSURE you won't get anywhere. If you never stop......the possibility of success never dies. In fact, its almost bound to happen!
Of course, some days, you look at that huge yard spread in front of you that still needs stone, you look at the muffin top oozing over your waistband, you look at that car in the garage and the HUNDREDS of bolts you need to turn before its complete. Its overfreakinwhelming. You'd rather go to the dentist for a root canal or something, than continue.
It looks like Mount Everest. But what if you were hiking that mountain, and it was foggy, and you couldn't see the top? You'd have NO IDEA how far away the top was, or how far you'd already come. You'd only see a few feet ahead, and you'd keep putting one foot in front of the other, until you got to that top.
That overwhelming factor has been removed. What if you made the choice to remove it, from every goal you have?
One day you go back out and decide ENOUGH, its time to start rebuilding your wall. You don't look at the rest of the yard, or the neighbors yard, or think about how freaking HUGE that gap is where the tree fell. You simply lay a stone. And another, And another. You throw on headphones and jam out to Van Halen. And Justin Beiber (I won't tell). You lay another stone. When you look up, the gap is filled. You've overcome your setback. You've realized that sometimes you just have to put the blinders on to your own excuses and GET IT DONE.
Tomorrow you'll lay another stone. And everyday for the rest of the year, stone after stone until that damn wall wraps all the way around your yard. You won't think too much about how much you have left, and you won't pat yourself on the back for how far you've come.
Those small goals are the key to staying consistent. Getting out there and doing SOMETHING every single day. But, for now its time to go in and clean the toilets. Unfortunately, you never did quite get that robot up and running.
