I am sitting here drinking my home-made hot chocolate and enjoying a slice of strawberry cheesecake. And I am thinking about the change that has overcome me at work. I had a great week at work. Not necessarily from a production standpoint, but from a process perspective. There were so many new roles that I needed to perform and I had some trouble getting down my process and mustering the confidence to stick to that process no matter how stupid I felt doing it.
But then I had this realization that…no one is a success overnight and everyone had to start somewhere. That even those who were the most successful in my role had to have failed before and that the only difference between them and the others is that they chose to believe that they wouldn’t let anything hinder them from doing as well as they believed they could. Everyone gets scared, feels stupid, gets rejected, gets told “no”, but stopping at those moments means you become like everyone else. Everyone else who makes excuses about the client, about the job, about the market, about the expectations, about everybody and everything else besides themselves. Pointing fingers and justifying their failures in a way that absolves them of the blame when the truth is that no one else but themselves are to blame. You know, it’s so easy to deflect. It feels good to not be the reason why you can’t do something. It means that you don’t need to change. That you have done everything that you need to do and it is out of your hands — it’s not your fault. But what goes unsaid, is that when you do this to yourself, it also means that you don’t get better. That you don’t get to see what you are actually capable of. That you don’t learn. That you don’t surprise yourself anymore.
So you need to make a choice. A choice to get back up, get out, get better, do better, keep going, explore your abilities, surprise others. Make a choice to be the stuff of wonder and possibility that sparks others to do the same.
Eve Crabapple - A Lifestyle and Literature Blog 