The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you’ve gotten the fish you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you’ve gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning. Once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can talk with him?”
— Zhuangzi – 300 BC
Success begins in the mind. You need to set your mind to do something if you want to achieve anything. You need to set a fish trap to catch fish.
Modern motivational gurus tell us to dream big, and to have a “can do” attitude. In The Secret Rhonda Byrne tells us that everything is possible.
We are told that we need to set ambitious long term goals, and clear short term targets. Just as the greyhound runs faster when chasing the mechanical rabbit, people are more motivated when pursuing identifiable targets.
If we achieve these goals we feel good about ourselves. Few things make us as happy as performing a difficult task well, and doing something useful.
What is more, making up our minds to do something makes us healthier and happier, regardless of our age, according to Harvard psychologist Ellen J. Langer, in her recent interesting book Mindfulness.
Langer warns about the dangers of limiting our opportunities by adhering to preconceived conceptions. She refers to the “destructive state of mindlessness.”
But reality has a habit of putting obstacles in the way of our dreams. We are not going to win every race. We may travel a long way down a road, only to find that we cannot quite achieve our original objective. If we only focus on the final goal, we can become uptight. Not only may this affect our chances of success, it makes us less likely to enjoy our journey.
In fact relaxed mindlessness has its benefits. Familiar thoughts and habits help us cope with the new experiences that we face in life. It is not practical to judge every new situation from scratch. Preconceived ideas are comforting, and useful.
Whether at work, or playing sports, or learning a language, we cannot constantly second-guess ourselves. We need to trust our “instincts”, which are mostly not instincts at all, but habits, the result of repetition and experience.
Life is not a short dog race, but a long journey with many detours. if we are too focused on chasing the mechanical rabbit and worried about short term outcomes, we may miss the enjoyment of every rich moment in our lives. If we relax, we are more likely to continue in our projects and acquire experience, knowledge and important life skills.
We should not allow ourselves to become disappointed if our achievements do not match our dreams. We should seek to enjoy what we are experiencing and achieving. This does not mean overstating the level of our achievements in some kind of empty assertion of our own self-esteem. It just means being satisfied with what are and what we have.
If need to combine the mindfulness of the motivational gurus with an effortless appreciation of life, every single day.
The Sage is occupied with the unspoken
and acts without effort.
Teaching without verbosity,
producing without possessing,
creating without regard to result,
claiming nothing,
the Sage has nothing to lose.Dao de jing – 600 BC
You are so right that sometimes the successes we actually achieve fall a bit short of our original goals or they end up being successes in other areas than what we intended. As you implied, we should not get too upset over these because successes, no matter how little they are, all add up. Also the confidence that we get from all of the even little successes is a by-product of achieving them and if we think about it, this confidence can be applied to other areas of life or even back to shooting for those original goals we set.
[...] Set Ambitious Goals (But Learn to Accept What You Achieve). [...]
This article made me think of the saying that goes something like “if you shoot for the moon, you may land among the stars.”. To shot for the moon I always keep a goal in my sights. The bigger the goal the better. At the very least I will have accomplished considerably more than I would have done without them. I get my motivation from people who have accomplished what I want for myself, if they can do it so can I!
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Achieving the goal is a continuous process. You need to follow step by step consistently if you wish to get to the end result. When you fail to achieve one goal on your life accept it but it doesn’t mean that you should stop and give up. You just need to evaluate your performance, Identify what’s wrong with your formerly action and continue the journey.
Thomas A. Edison has failed 999 times in his bold lamp experiment before he succeeded inventing a bold lamp. Abraham Lincoln has failed in his congress member election, failed in his senate election, failed in vice president election before he succeeded elected to be a president of US.
So if you persist to chase the goal though you have to fail thousand times, you can guarantee your self you will succeed someday.
Another video endorsing the same point
http://www.youtube.com/arunpurang#p/a/u/0/gwRmWMUe8AQ