Taking the Time

“Com­mit­ment is what turns a promise into real­ity. It is the words that speak boldly of your inten­tions. And the actions that speak louder than words. It is mak­ing the time when there is none. Com­ing through time after time after time, year after year after year. Com­mit­ment is the stuff char­ac­ter is made of; the power to change the face of things. It is the daily tri­umph of integrity over skep­ti­cism.“
– Unsourced

“Patience is bit­ter, but its fruit is sweet.“
– Anony­mous

You may have heard of Thoreau’s advice, “Do what you fear and the death of that fear is cer­tain.” I fig­ured that becom­ing a sales­per­son was the best way to fight my fear since rejec­tion is com­mon­place in sales. In the begin­ning, though, I cer­tainly was no sales super­star. Work­ing solely on com­mis­sion and with no income to show for, I filed for bank­ruptcy (one of two, if you recall). You might say that I became what my father pro­grammed me to believe.

Slowly but surely, how­ever, I man­age to over­come my set­backs and even­tu­ally became the num­ber one sales­per­son in Canada for a large, multi­na­tional insur­ance com­pany. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Now, the point I’m try­ing to make is that becom­ing pur­pose­ful won’t make you an overnight suc­cess let alone guar­an­tee it. It takes time. Jim Rohn said, “Part of suc­cess is prepa­ra­tion on pur­pose.” Alec MacKen­zie said, “A bad deci­sion is usu­ally the result of a hasty one.” Ide­ally, you must take the time to learn why you should reach your goals and not how you can reach them.

Once you’ve defined your upper­most val­ues, you will know which goals are impor­tant and why they are. This is what being con­scious is all about and it’s not some­thing you achieve at some point in the future. You will never be sat­is­fied with your goals or with your­self after their achieve­ment if you haven’t prop­erly mas­tered your life right now.

Like it or not, the grat­i­fi­ca­tion you will receive out of any goal is directly pro­por­tional to the qual­ity of your life, for how you focus on your pri­or­i­ties will affect your results as well as your appre­ci­a­tion of those results.

So, take the time to know or at least dis­cover your val­ues. In other words, your goals should not speed you up but slow you down. At first, it may seem hard to take the time you need to cre­ate a bet­ter plan for your life. Oth­er­wise, the lack of plan­ning will cause you unnec­es­sary stress, frus­tra­tion, and the pos­si­ble aban­don­ment of your goals.

You may also cut cor­ners and get what you want, but as the Law of Bal­ance says, “What goes around, comes around.” If you take a “bite” out of what’s impor­tant in your life, it will always come back and “bite” you some­how. Poet Nan­cye Sims, in The World Needs More Dream­ers, wrote: “Dream­ers are patient for they know a goal is only as wor­thy as the effort that’s required to achieve it.”

Don’t con­fuse eager­ness with impa­tience because they are entirely dif­fer­ent. It’s OK to be eager, but don’t get so impa­tient that you don’t take the time to pre­pare your goals let alone for your goals. Unsure, you might end up doing what may seem rel­e­vant when very often your actions will only be smoke-​​screens.

Abra­ham Lin­coln once said, “If I have to chop down a tree and only had six hours to do it, I would take four hours to sharpen my ax.” If you are impa­tient, it might take you more time if not more effort to get what you want. Being pre­pared may seem like a lot of work, but it really isn’t if you are gen­uinely eager.

In The Power of Desire, one of Jack Zufelt’s stu­dents wanted to get a black belt in Karate as did his men­tor. The stu­dent asked what he must do and Jack replied that, although he can do it, he would need to prac­tice an hour each day for four years. Dis­ap­pointed, the stu­dent aban­doned his goal, say­ing, “I just don’t have the patience.”

To this per­son, although it may seem as an impor­tant goal to him, get­ting the black belt was not a gen­uine core value. If it really were, no mat­ter how much time or effort it would have taken he would have achieved his black belt by now. Addi­tion­ally, he would have enjoyed the process.

About the Author

Last 5 Posts By Michel Fortin

• How to Capture and Captivate Attention
• The Real Problem With The Flaw of Attraction
• Two Shining Stars in an Age of Darkness
• Changes, Relaunches, and Extreme Makeovers
• Superior Value Equals Superior Sales

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