I'm not sure I do.
A few months ago my big sis recommended that I listen to "The Revisionaries" by Michele Romanow and something clicked inside me. For those of you who may not know, Michele Romanow is a Canadian serial entrepreneur, Co-Founder of Clearbanc, most commonly known as a Dragon on Dragons' Den and a role model to many. "The Revisionaries" is a 10 episode series that exposes the failures that come with the success stories, something that we can all benefit from hearing about whether we're interested or not. You can check this series out on audible, but long story short and the reason for this post is to share my personal epiphany with you... people aren't born lucky, people aren't born with specific skills, people choose to persevere.
Anybody with any sort of important goal or idea, needs to know that getting there is not always easy. We need to expect challenges and we need to expect failures. This is all part of the process. Expecting things to be smooth, fun and exciting all the time is simply unrealistic and leads to my least favorite verb "to quit".
Over the past several years of my life, I feel like I've heard this message in many different ways, told by a variety of people but only now am I starting to understand the real meaning behind perseverance, and it's my new favorite word.
Why are we trained to think that when things get tough, we are doing something wrong? Why do we want to change course when we don't see immediate results?
I agree that when something isn't working, we need to make adjustments and maybe even sometimes take a 180 deg. turn, but adapting is not the same as quitting. To quit when things get tough, or when things get boring, is like taking a lasagna out of the oven when it's still frozen. We haven't even let it get to room temperature yet and we're ready to change meals all together?!
One quote, written by Robin Sharma, that really hits a home run for me is this: "All change is hard at first, messy in the middle and gorgeous at the end". I think this quote can be applied to anything in life. Whether it's changing old habits and implementing better ones or working towards achieving one's goals, we need to expect hard, messy and gorgeous. What's critical at the beginning is understanding your desire for change, and setting targets that are important to YOU. For this to work, you have to want it and then you have to stay hungry.
Expect HARD, expect MESSY, expect GORGEOUS.
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