It’s hard to believe that there’s one thing that guarantees your success no matter what you’re trying to achieve, but there is.
I’ll tell you exactly what it is a little later, but first, I want to tell you a story about this lady I know. We’ll call her Jennifer.
Jennifer was a doctor with a thriving practice. She loved her job, her patients, and her life. She also had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. The desire to ask ‘why’ started as a child and never went away.
One weekend she went to a seminar and, for lunch, she and her colleagues went to a restaurant. She got sick that night, but brushed it off as a bad case of stomach flu. After all, one of her colleagues had kids that had been sick the night before.
But a week later, Jennifer was still sick.
It finally went away, but two more times that year she experienced week-long episodes of ‘the stomach flu.’ The third time, she decided to have some tests run. When the results came back, it showed that she had a parasite.
She took some medication and thought she was good to go. But she wasn’t quite the same, got tired really easily, and became a little less active.
Two years later, Jennifer went to bed one night and struggled to wake up the next day. More tests were run, and more parasites were found.
This process went on for years. During that time, she had to close her practice because so much damage was done to her body that she just couldn’t stand all day anymore.
That also meant that she couldn’t do almost every activity that she used to love. She went from being optimistic, grounded, active, and confident to a bit of a lost soul.
Life felt like it was falling apart around her. She was sick and tired of being sick and tired. During one especially bad stretch of time, Jennifer lost over 30 pounds (14kg) in 40 days.
She couldn’t eat because the pain was so severe and, although it wasn’t the first time, she began to wonder if she was going to live. The thought of just slipping away, no longer having to feel so much pain or struggle constantly for simple things other people took for granted…those things tempted her.
To make a long story short, Jennifer lived.
Not only did she live, she finally found the right person to help her find the last parasite, prescribe the right treatment, and she got well. She started a new career. She found new activities her body would tolerate. In short, she transformed her life.
And she did it all because she used the thing I mentioned at the beginning of the email.
What’s the secret sauce?
She didn’t quit.
The number one way to guarantee your success is to never quit until you’re successful.
Now maybe you’re thinking that what I just said is obvious or even ridiculous. Maybe you’re even thinking, “Of course the people who succeed don’t quit!”
But how many times have you quit something in your life?
Go to any gym the first week of each year and then go again in six months. Chances are very high that most of the people you saw the first time dropped out long ago. They quit.
You, me, my clients, anyone you’ve shared my emails with…one or more times in our lives we’ve quit. We put in hard work, sweat, tears, and time… but instead of hanging in there to claim our reward, we quit.
It’s likely that we quit because the end wasn’t in sight and we lost focus of why we were doing what we were all of this work. But frankly, sometimes we probably quit a day or two before we would have succeeded.
You hear me talk about how much easier Mindful Change makes your life. And that’s completely 100% true. But the process of changing — sometimes that’s a bitch.
We simply don’t like new and different, so we rebel against it, fight it and try to convince ourselves that maybe we didn’t want to change after all. But if you want to succeed, you can’t quit.
I have two quotes for you this week. I encourage you to really think about them.
“The ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones that do.”
~Anonymous
“Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.”
~Pablo Picasso