Do
you ever stop and reflect or evaluate your direction in your life journey?
Do you ever take a serious in depth look at your successes and failures and
wonder why they occurred? Neither success in life nor failure occurs in a single
cataclysmic moment. Both are the result of the accumulation of what seems like
small and insignificant decisions. Choices, decisions, selections; each provides
us with an opportunity to develop the quality of our future.
Failure does not happen overnight! Failure is an inevitable result caused by
the accumulation of a few errors in judgment, poor choices and undirected thinking
repeated day after day.Now, why would someone make an error in judgment and then be foolish enough to repeat it over and over, day after day? The answer is because they do not think it matters.
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result."
- Albert Einstein
By themselves our daily actions do not always seem that important. A poor decision, a minor oversight, a wasted morning hour or two, don't in themselves seem to have any measurable impact on our overall lives. If we have done little to improve our personal development in the past couple of weeks or months it doesn't seem to have a drastic or immediate impact on the quality of our life. Since nothing drastically wrong happened at that moment, it doesn't seem to matter. Far worse than not reading that book, not taking that class, blowing off your workout, watching garbage on T.V., etc. is not even realizing that it matters!
When people eat too many of the wrong types of foods they are contributing to a future of health problems, but the pleasure of the moment outweighs the pain and consequence of the future. At the moment of enjoyment it doesn't seem to matter. Someone who smokes or drinks too much and too frequently makes the same small errors every moment they indulge, yet it doesn't seem to phase them in the short term. I often wonder why reasonable, intelligent people still smoke with all the results that are evident. The inevitable pain and destruction are only delayed, the price they will pay in the future will be absolutely devastating to themselves and those around them. Failure's most dangerous attribute therefore is subtlety. In the short term we don't seem to be failing. We just drift from one day to the next, repeating our errors, making bad decisions, listening to the wrong people and making the wrong choices.
Why don't more people take time to think out their future? The reason is that most people are too caught up in their day to day activities to realize the importance.Most people, in fact plan their vacations better than they plan their lives.
But, imagine the results if we did develop a new discipline to take a few minutes each day to look further down the road. By disciplining ourselves to look ahead, we would be able to adjust our way of thinking, correct our errors and develop new habits to replace the old. As we make the commitment to voluntarily change our daily disciplines, we will experience positive results in a relatively short period of time.
The real magic of this new discipline is that it will cause us to change our thinking. To change ourselves from how we are to how we want to be, we must begin by changing our personal philosophy, those few basic principles that affect the way we think.
All disciplines affect each other. Every new discipline affects not only the discipline that we have already begun to practice, everything we do has an effect on everything else we do.