Little drops of water
For someone who has highly-ambitious goals and the potential to be outstanding, I have to honestly and shamefully admit that I’ve achieved very little.
If I were to create a simulation in which I follow through on all the things I said I would do, I’ll definitely be a thousand miles ahead, standing in the sun, living the good life with a hefty portfolio of groundbreaking projects, a litany of accomplishments, shelves full of awards, global accolades and a Wikipedia page to my name.
But my current reality is not a simulation and as much as I find solace in the label “late bloomer”, I’ve realized that that label could also double as a weapon of enablement.
A friend recently shared this video with me where the speaker defines success as “the progressive realization of a worthy ideal”. He says that;
If a man is working towards a pre-determined goal and knows where he is going, that man is a success.
Sometime in early February, I caught myself freaking out about the year getting out of my hands. January had gone by and I had carried one major project into the new month despite my very strict timeline. This threatened to cast me into my recurring state of self-loathing.
One really good piece of advice I was given at that time was to take on things in small bits and aim for one tiny win every day… “progressive realization”.
Being told to take things one tiny step at a time, might not seem like life-changing advice, but it definitely cured my anxiety.
I am guilty of allowing myself to get overwhelmed before I even begin a project. My active imagination works against me to magnify the tasks I need to accomplish and they immediately seem like a mountain that’s impossible to climb.
This magnified view of the tasks at hand, the pressure of expected results and the plethora of things I have to figure out, drives me into a strange state of fear that completely cripples me. I start to question my credibility, doubt my abilities, and concoct non-essential pre-requisites that I insist I must complete in order to move forward.
I’m in a better place now.
I’ve resolved to take things one step at a time, to work progressively and deliberately toward my goals, to see things through and violently defend myself against any feeling that threatens to cripple me.
By being persistent, you’re demonstrating faith.
Another friend told me one Friday evening that she admires my ability to self-therapize; to tell myself the truth, talk myself out of deep funks and into action.
It’s a habit I’ve been practicing for as long as I can remember. I’ve given myself countless reality checks; always from a place of honesty, never brutal.
And so at this point, I usher myself into a new reality. One where I’m courageous enough to essentially start from scratch, to build from the ground up and gradually work my way from zero to one, and then to one hundred. Knowing that eventually, these little drops of water will definitely make a mighty ocean.
