Ben Martin, of the FatherLife.com, shares an insightful article on men's behavior and how we tackle life's most challenging roles while keeping life in perspective. Are you selling yourself short?
The Father Life: Selling Ourselves Short
| Author: Ben Murphy TheFatherLife.com | Posted: 11/19/09 | ||
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There’s an old adage that “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” The problem with most of us is that we make great plans, we just have trouble carrying them out. The truth of the matter is that we can only achieve what we attempt. Most of us sell ourselves short because we plan well, but never get around to the attempting.
I write about this topic because we can only be at our fullest when we pursue all we know we are capable of. It’s a little thing called ‘fulfillment.’ But a lot of people I talk to seem awfully unfulfilled, living in a world of “if only.” They love their family, but their job devours all their time. They shuttle their kids to endless activities, but never spend quality time with them. Their lives keep coming back to, “if only I’d started that business when the idea was fresh,” or, “if only I’d followed-through and finished my degree.”
I deeply believe that our main obligation in life is to do the best we can with what we’ve been given. It’s a high ideal, but its comes from observing other successful folks through the years. The folks I know who are getting what they want out of life are the ones who haven’t sold themselves short on their ideas and their dreams. They’ve taken small but steady steps in a concerted direction and made it happen. They benefit, their families benefit, and the community around them benefits too.
What’s your “if only?” Where are you selling yourself short? For some of us it’s in our work. For some it’s our health. No one else is going to solve that dilemma for you and all the planning in the world isn’t going to make your dreams come true. So, how do you get from here to there? Here are two small but powerful lessons I’ve learned about from others that have impacted my life. I hope they’re of as much use to you as they have been to me.
FAILURE OF SUCCESS
I have a good friend who, until a couple years ago, was in a boring IT job that paid the bills, but he wasn’t very happy. He’d always been interested in photography, so he bought himself a camera and shot a few friends’ weddings. Turns out he was pretty good at it. Sure enough word spread and he was getting more requests, so he started charging. And he kept getting requests. He now shoots weddings full-time. He has a very healthy income, has flexibility to be with his family, and is now flown out to shoot weddings in places like the Hamptons… all because he decided to start doing something he’d always wished he’d done. The reason I say this is because one of the things he shared with me about making the transition is that he realized he’d always been afraid of success. For a lot of us who have a pretty good life, why rock the boat? While the idea of unbridled success is great, at the risk of losing our current standard-of-living, most folks don’t take that step. It’s strange to think that we’re afraid of success, but most of us are.
THE LONG GAME
One of the most profound truths in life is that we typically overestimate what we can achieve over a short period of time, and we severely underestimate what we can achieve over a long period of time. When we have a dream, it often seems overwhelming to imagine accomplishing it in a month or a year. But what about two years? Three years? That amount of time flies by surprisingly quickly in our busy lives and even an hour each week devoted to one thing can steadily move a dream along. You sneak in :20 here and :30 there. Pretty soon you’ve spent an hour or two each week and you see progress. Progress breeds enthusiasm. And once that enthusiasm takes hold, it’s awfully hard to slow down!
If you feel like you’re not getting all you’d like out of life, do some reflection. Where are you selling yourself short?
Ben Murphy is the Founder of www.thefatherlife.com, the online men’s magazine for dads. He lives
in New York State with his wife and three daughters.
