“Success is going from failure to failure without the loss of enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill
Churchill understood that what is seared in our memory, what we remember when contemplating a new endeavor, is not our prior successes, but our failures. We can even look back on past successes and say ‘Who accomplished that? It couldn’t have been me, I don’t know how to do that!’
Then you remember that you did do it and you can do it again, but not before having to traipse through a mind field of doubt IN SPITE of evidence to the contrary. It is our perceived failures that are out to kill enthusiasm and we must be defensive in protecting it. We do that by being realistic. By looking at what we REALLY are capable of.
We all know that there are some people who don’t have this problem. They are overconfident and have an ungrounded enthusiasm that
can be very dangerous to become entangled in. Avoid those people.
But my experience has shown me that many more people are in the self-doubting camp and need encouragement to look at themselves honestly and see that they are MORE capable than their self-judgment is telling them.
Drawing © Marty Coleman | napkindad.com