Inspired by a Four-Year-Old
I’d just finished swimming a mile in the pool when the joyful laughter of a four-year-old caught my attention.
She had this beautiful pink Barbie swimsuit styled like a tutu, with pink goggles to match.
She was attempting daredevil leaps into the water with the aim of jumping over a bright yellow noodle water float.
She missed a few times, but each time she immediately got right out of the water and tried again. In the end she got it right.
She was able throw herself from the edge of the pool in all sorts of different poses right over the noodle.
She was irresistible! I could not stop watching. She was having so much FUN. As I watched, I started to wonder how many of us give up on a goal when we experience a setback.
There is much we can learn from this four-year-old. Here’s what she was doing:
- She had a CLEAR goal—to jump over the noodle.
- She attempted the noodle jump countless times.
- Each time she failed, she just got out of the water and did it again.
- Each attempt to jump over the noodle was approached from a different angle. If the way she jumped over the noodle didn’t get her the desired result, she changed her approach.
- She was having FUN.
- She succeeded at her goal.
In the book Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill says that
‘one of the most common causes of failure is the habit of quitting when one is overtaken by temporary defeat. Every person is guilty of this mistake at one time or another’.
Hill tells of a man named R. U. Darby who quit digging for gold when the vein of gold ore he found disappeared!
A junk man who bought the equipment for a few hundred dollars called in a mining engineer to look at the mine. The engineer realized that the project had failed because the owners had not been familiar with ‘fault lines’. His calculations showed that the vein would be found just three feet from where the Darbys had stopped drilling. That is exactly where it was found! The junk man excavated millions of dollars in ore from the mine because he knew enough to seek expert counsel before giving up.
R. U. Darby, learning from his lost fortune, never gave up again. He’d tell himself,
‘I stopped three feet from gold, but I will never stop because men say no when I ask them to buy insurance’.
Adversity can lead to success, if you are open to learning from your past mistakes. I hope the four-year-old and R. U. Darby inspire you to carry on.
Are you stuck?
I’m happy to help you take the next step.
Drop me a line.
Neera Menon
Goal Achievement Coach
PS. THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR FOR YOUR BIRTHDAY WISHES!
Leave a Reply