Everything You Want Is On The Other Side

We all want things that we don't currently have. More money, more freedom, more time, a vacation, some material object, and anything else you can dream up. Many people will tell you to just accept that you can't have those things, to live in safe mediocrity. I'm here to tell you that you CAN have them. The thing that stops most people is that they're on the other side of hardship, on the other side of the finish line.

Finding Your Finish Line

Think of the one thing you want most in the world that you don't have and aren't working towards. Now ask yourself why you don't have it. Chances are it has something to do with how much you'd have to go through and/or give up to have it. On the other side of all of that pain, sacrifice, and hardship is your finish line.

An added benefit to this thought experiment is judging just how badly you want the things you think you desire. Is what it will take to cross the finish line for each of them worth it? Perhaps for some of them, it isn't. We only have so much time allotted to us, and only you can decide what you will achieve with it.

One my own immediate finish lines each day is the extra rep or extra few seconds I go in a work out. On the other side of that finish line are multiple rewards, not the least of which is continuing to earn my own permission to talk to all of you like this each week. On the other side of that threshold every day is the accomplishment needed to say to all of you "and you can, too."

Having what you want in life is rarely a case of what we actually can and cannot have. It is more often a question of whether or not you are willing to pay the price to get to the other side and obtain it.

Getting Across

Getting across the finish line is almost never easy. If it was, you were either extraordinarily lucky, or you weren't aiming high enough. There's nothing wrong with setting easily achievable short term goals, but they shouldn't be your finish fine. They're not your mount peak. Just handholds on the way up.

You'll get tired. You'll want to quit. It will even seem like it's a good idea to quit. Fear, logic, doubt, other's opinions, and a host of other things will try to convince you to stop short of being truly great.

Your legs will want to give out before you put that extra second into that sprint. You'll want to drop after that punch. You'll want to leave work the moment your shift is over, even though staying just another fifteen minutes would mean completing that project.

All of these urges are lies. They are trying to get you to listen to the siren call of mediocrity, to the comfort of being average. You must resist these at all costs. You must being willing to endure, to suffer, to bleed, to sacrifice to go that extra millimeter further to get across that line.

Once you do it once, you'll know you can do it again. After all, if you could do one more rep, one more second, one more task this time, what's to say you can't do an additional one next time? How many more can you do? How much longer can you keep adding? Always one more.

What Are Your Finish Lines?

As always, I want to hear from all of you. What are your finish lines, and what drives you across them? What keeps you extending them further every day?