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"Cursed is the ground
because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it
all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and
thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the
field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food
until you return to the ground, since from it you were
taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return."
- Genesis 3:17-19
And this is just our curse
for life. Work is not meant to be fun. Work is not meant
to be enjoyed. Just look at ants, those busybodies. We are
supposed to work like them. There has to be an easier way.
I have inside me this
paradox. I want to become successful, but not with too
much work. My struggle is with laziness and with not
following through with the things I have started.
Sub-consciously I have had the mentality: "Nobody
really likes work. Why would I be different?" I want
to take the easy road to success. I have even set goals to
achieve what I perceive as success, only to come short of
one ingredient - action. I want to be like Robert Frost
and say that I took the path less travelled, yet the path
of least resistance, of laziness, is much easier. I have
come to realise for things to change I must change.
But where does one begin? I
went back to the books I have read and the people whom I
respect. I studied the likes of Tiger Woods and Bill
Gates. Of all the successful people I have studied, to the
last one, they are hard workers. We often dream of living
a life like Tiger Woods must surely lead. But Tiger's work
on golf started when he was just three years old. Would
you want to work for seventeen years at one thing until
you make a success of it and continue to work on it day in
and day out? Bill Gates would often work throughout the
night and his co-workers would go home and when they would
come back the next day, he would still be there.
Eighteen-hour days, seven days per week. Do you want to
work that hard?
Work, the noun, means the
"expenditure of energy, striving, application of
effort to some purpose" (Oxford dictionary) or
"the exertion of strength; effort directed to an
end" (President New English Dictionary). Often we
want the purpose or end, but are not willing to expend the
energy. They say a journey of a thousand miles begins with
a single step, but what they often neglect to say is that
you have about two million steps to go. Yes, success is
hard work and if you are not a hard worker, success will
remain but a distant dream.
So what are we, who tend to
inertia, to do? It is simple really: just take the next
step, and the next, and the next, and the next... For
every step of your journey, you will come up with excuses
or reasons not to go on. Use your mind to steamroller
these objections. What do I mean by this? Let me use an
example. Until recently I had a problem getting up in the
morning when my alarm would go off. Often I would snooze
it until there is no more snooze left on the alarm (an
hour later). What I started to do is, the evening before,
I would imagine what I would feel like when the alarm goes
off. How I would grumble while still feeling very sleepy.
I would imagine how I would go to the bathroom even
thinking that I would want to sleep some more. I would
then pre-programme my mind to react to these objections
and steamroller them. I would switch of the alarms instead
of snoozing it ("Its too much effort to set the alarm
again just to get some more sleep"), I would switch
on the radio ("I cannot sleep with all that noise and
its too much effort to switch off as its in a different
room") and I would start the bath tap running
("I would not want to waste the water already
run"). After a bath or shower I would be awake and
not thinking of sleep anymore. And in the end I would even
imagine being proud of myself for overcoming my own
objections and getting up early. In the same way we should
do this with all the other things that require work or
effort - imagine your objections, imagine yourself
steamrolling your objections and most important of all
imagine you are successful at it.
What if you would fail?
What if you would fall? Just get up and take the next
step. Never cease your journey because you have fallen.
Remember how far you have come - all the steps you have
taken. If you want to be successful, work is the key. Yes,
even repetitive work. And after you have toiled, you will
come to realise "The pen might be mightier than the
sword, but the plough is mightier than all."
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About
The Author
Leon
van der Walt is an aspiring netrepreneur
in the fields of inspiration and financial
freedom. Leon has a masters degree in
quantitative risk management and when not
working on the Net is a bank employee. He
strives to continually improve himself and
is focussing on increasing financial
literacy. He is the web master at www.financial-inspiration.com
and can be contacted at leon@financial-inspiration.com. |
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