Romancing the Stone

Here's a lesson I have somehow managed to learn along the way in between bites of steamed broccoli: one way to succeed with more regularity is to lower your expectations. When you don't expect quite so much it's easier to get there. It's quite simple really, and often it is even painless.

Let's say it is the expectation of your job to sell one hundred chances a day. You find that it is a difficult quota to meet so you lower the number to 75, which you reach with alarming regularity. You now daily, fully meet your expectations but over a week's worth of work you are selling one hundred twenty five to one hundred seventy five less chances than you originally wanted to. Are you really succeeding or have you merely managed to fail more slowly?

Yes indeed if you have low expectations, they are easy to meet and you don't have to worry about the quality of what you have accomplished so much. Set those standards high and watch that failure rate rise like there is no tomorrow. Reach out for the unreachable and fall into the web of bitter disappointment.

"The difference between failure and success is doing a thing nearly right and doing a thing exactly right."
-Unknown

"She knows there's no success like failure and that failure is no success at all." -Bob Dylan

"Success is like a box of failed chocolates, it's easy on the way down, and sometimes hard on the way out."
-David the "Gump" Maeda

Beauty lies in the eye of the distant beholder. There is a fine line to walk between compromise and losing your original intentions or vision while managing to get by. Another way to avoid the sting of failure is to stress the successes over the near misses. Take the game of baseball for example. There are many ways a player can succeed; maybe you can't hit a lick but you can pick up ground balls with the skill of that most famous pickup artist, Valentino. Plenty of teams need the good field no hit types. BINGO Pedro, you are a success! But the true most valuable type players aren't the ones who do one thing well, it's the few that can do a little bit of everything well. Versatility and adaptability are rare and admirable traits.

We live in an instant, fast food culture. People expect results yesterday. Today's trends become tomorrow's washed up ideas. What people sometime forget is that success seldom occurs over night, it is something that in most cases, has to be thought over carefully, and nurtured fully before the seeds blossom into the desired results.

We may no longer fall in love at first sight, but to keep the mind's eye focused and open to the possibility is the thing that becomes more and more difficult over time. Patience is often rewarding in ways that can't be seen by initial first impressions. Intelligence, thoughtful conversation, the building of relationships, sometimes have their appeal over short term one night stands.

Of course the trick, and the all too difficult skill is to learn how long you should wait before you realize it is pointless to continue on the same path. When do dreams become fantasies? When do you realize what you want to happen may never happen? You don't want to wait too long on the shore and let all those damn boats pass you by. When we all live in an environment of uncertainty, of change, it is difficult to remain faithful to our principles, and still have the long term and the short term insight to be able to change the game plan but keep the spirit behind the original goals in mind.

It is so easy to get bogged down in the day to day activities that make up life and not appreciate the whole picture. Many of us take breathing for granted. For some, another breath seems like a climb up Everest. But what constitutes a disappointment these days? Do we measure our successes by our failures and is this truly the thing we wanna do?