There has never been a more opportune time to follow your heart and realize your dreams. However getting to the pot of gold is not always easy. It takes dedication, commitment and the willingness to do whatever it takes.
So how do you go on when the going gets tough. When you have dug and toiled, day after day, week after week, and you experience all kinds of disappointments and frustrations.
When you have used the best scientific data, indicating the best locations to dig and are still not finding the rich deposit, which you know is there somewhere. Or when you have developed the best looking website, developed the best product and what you think is the best sales copy, and you still fail to make the sales that you know should follow?
Do you say it is not working and give up, like the gold prospector in Napoleon Hill’s classic “think and grow rich”, who stopped just 3 feet from his pot of gold?
What do you do when everything you know, doesn’t seem to work?
The best thing to do is to take time out and become still. Yes, stop toiling for a while and make some quiet time, because it’s no use just hammering away if you are hitting at the wrong place.
The quiet time will help you reflect on what you have done so far and gain some new perspective. Take a book that has inspired you countless times or the Bible and read.
Don’t put pressure on yourself trying to find an answer, just let yourself go, any whichever way and the answers will come.
Take a piece of paper and just write. What about? Anything really. You can write about the confusion you feel.
Talk to yourself, not negative stuff that will make you feel worse then you already do, but tell yourself that you are getting the answers you are looking for. Don’t talk as someone who is without hope but talk like someone who knows it’s only a matter of time.
Most importantly though, listen to yourself, and then try again using some of the new insights you have gained from your inner person, your subconscious.
Sometimes, you’re at the right place, you just need to go 3 feet further down or 3 feet to the left, or right. Or sometimes the time just isn’t right and you just need to wait a little while longer.
But these are things no scientific data will ever tell you. This is something which comes from inside you, your subconscious mind which knows everything.
That is why it is important to take time out and listen, because if you don’t you may just miss the key you need and waste an awful lot of time and money.
Here’s something else you can do. Every time you feel discouraged or a little afraid, go and read about your icons or heroes. How they started out. How they felt, when they were still at the bottom, the things they said and did when it really got rough, and be inspired. If possible try and trace a childhood friend of your heroes and talk to them.
In his classic, “Think and Grow Rich” Napoleon Hill describes how his subjects held imaginary conversations with great men who went before them. The result was that afterwards they became more inspired.
Imagine having an intimate, one on one conversation with Bill Gates or Henry Ford, and asking them all the questions you’ve always wanted to ask them.
It would be awesome wouldn’t it. When you come out of there you will be so focused on your goal that nothing anybody say will discourage you.
Something else you should do is to continuously remind yourself that everybody who is now successful, was once at the very place where you are now. The important thing is that they didn’t remain there.
If you are serious about attaining your goals you will also not remain there. But remember, it requires commitment and dedication even through the tough times.
Oh, how sweet it is to hold that prize after all the struggling. That’s when you realize all the trials and tribulations were worth it. But you will never savor that experience, you will never know how good it feels when you give up.