Unworthy of note

In the fifteen years since her first job, she had achieved not a thing worth of note.

With failed starts queuing up to summarise her career, her grey hair lengthened regardless of a resumé refusing to impress. Promising big breaks all shattered into nothingness.

Day by day, expending labour and expecting nothing, from home to work and back, she walked a routine so plain and black.

Despite income in a steady flow, her dreams towered over unsteady floor. Enough for a living but not so for a life.

She’d failed a thousand times before.

Always willing to try once more.

 

Drawing the line

It’s weird how sometimes people never know where and how to draw the line. Although in this case, it looked to me as if the architect of the De Young Museum in San Francisco did a wonderful job of putting their toes out of the lines.

lines

Can I?

“I can” is an emotion.

It’s powerful.

It’s aspirational.

We may write down our goals, set up reminders, even team up with accountability partners, and still fail. The reason is that all those are material factors. What we need instead, is determination from within—the mind.

We humans possess an incredible tendency to believe in things. Take placebo, for instance. We believe it’s a cure and it becomes a cure. It doesn’t matter that it’s a regular sugar pills. For our placebo-ed self, it’s a miracle worker.

Most people who think they want to change their lifestyle, live healthy, or make a positive change at work fail because their belief isn’t strong enough. Whole-hearted belief isn’t as strong without whole-minded belief.

It’s not just about writing it down or telling people. We often think saying it out loud stimulates our ego and motivates us to persevere. I don’t think that works.

For me, not telling anyone works. Telling myself, my mind, what I want to become, how I want to live, and what I want to achieve in the process keeps me motivated. I reflect on my life and decide for myself. I make a change in an instant, and see it through. That determination comes only when the influence comes from within.

Instead, when we look up to other people for constant motivate, influence, and validate us, whatever riles up in us, will shrivel down as fast as it rises.

Inspiration is good. It’s necessary even. However, we can’t just run on inspiration from others. What makes them run is their own determination, and it’s from that determination that they inspire. Just inhaling what they exude gets us no where unless we have our own grit to hold us to our goals.