Success is a Process, Don’t You Give Up Now

At midnight on January 1, I wonder how many people renewed the same resolutions they made the New Years before and the New Years before that? Why is it so hard to follow through on the list of things we say are most important to change in our lives? Why do we find ourselves repeating the same mistakes that end us up in the same place of failure year after year? Why do we hit the ground running toward our goals every January 1st and within weeks we are right back in the place we were the previous December 31st?

I think we set ourselves up for both failure and success. Neither of these things just happen to us. One way we set ourselves up for failure is to fail to prepare. Someone once said “To fail to plan is to plan to fail”.

Take dieting for example (I don’t know about you, but it seems to appear every year on my Things-I-want-to-change-this-year list). When I’m walking into the kitchen famished is not the best time to decide upon a healthy, well-balanced meal. I’m more likely to grab the quickest, closest thing in the fridge at that moment. The time to prepare for success in my diet is the night before. Writing out a meal plan for the following day only takes a few minutes but it can be a great tool for success in reaching my weight-loss goals.

I like to think of life as a series of snap-shots. A professional photographer doesn’t show up to take wedding pictures with a quick-shot instant camera. He knows you can get a quick picture with an instant camera, but it is not going to be the quality of photograph that a wedding photo deserves. Using the “Diet” analogy again, we too can get some quick results with fad diets or pills if we are more concerned with getting it done quickly than getting it done properly. The goal of the photographer is to eventually enable the newlyweds to see the beautiful images that he alone is now viewing through his lens. Let’s compare the process of reaching our goals to the process of photo development.

First of all, the photographer must Focus the camera. Just as I must Focus on my target goal. If I do not know exactly where it is I want to go, how will I know when I have arrived? The dictionary defines the word Focus as: “Clear and sharply defined, A central point of attraction, attention, activity, to concentrate or focus ones attention”.