Great people throughout history often fail, quite miserably,
before finally reaching their goals, says international business strategist Dan Waldschmidt.
“Van Gogh sold only one painting during his lifetime;
Winston Churchill lost every public election until becoming prime minister at age 62; Henry Ford went bankrupt
five times; Albert Einstein was a terrible student and was
expelled from school; Sigmund Freud was booed from a
stage,” says Waldschmidt, author of “Edgy Conversations:
How Ordinary People Achieve Outrageous Success,”.
“Ideas, brilliance, genius – they all mean nothing without
the guts, passion and tenacity necessary to make your
dream a reality. But often, people fall back on excuses and
give up on trying to reach their goals.”
Most of us have dreams, and many of us have big ones,
but few of us actually see them through, he says.
He offers six tricks for jumping off the excuse train and
forge the path to your goals.
• Avoid the need to blame others for anything. Mean,
small-minded people know that they suck. That’s why they
are so cranky and eager to point out others’ mistakes.
They hope that by causing others to feel inadequate, everyone will forget about how woefully off the mark their
own performance is. Don’t blame anyone, for any reason,
ever. It’s a bad habit.
• Stop working on things that just don’t matter. Not everything needs to be done in place of sleep. If you work for a
boss, then you owe them solid time. You can’t cut that out.
You can, however, cut out television time, meetings and
anything else that gets in the way of achieving your goals.
Replace entertainment with activity toward your goal.
• Refuse to let yourself wallow in self-doubt. You’re alive
to succeed. Stop comparing your current problems to your
last 18 failures. They are not the same. You are not the
same. Here’s something to remember: Your entire life has
been a training ground for you to capture your destiny
right now. Why would you doubt that? Stop whining. Go
conquer.
• Ask yourself, “What can I do better next time?” And then
do it next time. If you spend a decade or two earnestly
trying to be better, that’s exactly what will happen. The
next best thing to doing something amazing is not doing
something stupid. So learn from your mistakes and use the
lessons to dominate.
• Proactively take time to do things that fuel your passion.
Exercise is a great example. Living in the moment requires
you to live at peak performance. A huge part of mental fitness is physical fitness. A sparring or running partner is a
great way to refresh physical competition. Physical activity
accelerates mental motivation.
• Apologize to yourself and those around you for having a
bad attitude. Do this once or twice and you’ll snap out of
your funk pretty fast. When you start genuinely apologizing for being a bad influence on those around you, you
learn to stop whining and start winning.
Overcome
Excuses
By Ginny Grimsley
www.EdgyConversations.com
FOCUS of SWFL 2014 35