When You Work Your Hardest for the First Time and Fail
Some people learn to work hard from a young age. For these people nothing has ever come easy and working hard is the only way to survive. Other people get by in life on cruise control. These people typically start with some natural advantage that allows them to give average effort and still get above average results. That is until they hit a wall that forces them to work hard.
Today, I am writing this for this second group of people who have gotten comfortable operating on cruise control. Cruise control is fine until it isn’t. There comes a time in life when natural advantages are no longer enough. It’s at this moment when you must put your foot on the gas. Unfortunately, however, the first time you do this it’s likely you will fail.
It’s just a fact of life that hard work doesn’t always equal success. This is even more likely when you work your hardest for the first time in your life. Don’t make the mistake of taking this as a sign that hard work doesn’t work.
While hard work may not guarantee success, it guarantees knowing the truth about whether you are doing enough to be successful. In other words, working your hardest and failing puts you in the game. Not working your hardest and failing means you aren’t even in the conversation.
Working Your Hardest for the First Time Allows You to Define Your New Normal
Therefore, if you are committed to turning failure into success, then turning off cruise control and turning on maximum effort must be your new normal. This new normal goes beyond just what you do, it becomes also about how you do it. Moreover, this new normal also goes beyond just physical effort, it becomes also about mental effort.
With this in mind, it’s a powerful mental exercise to write down what you think the new normal will be as you progress to working your hardest in this next phase in your journey. It’s a fact that you can’t continue to operate on cruise control and expect to get different results. So, changing what’s normal for you is a must. However, change doesn’t happen overnight. Change is a process.
When you write down what normal looks like once you get off cruise control and work your hardest each day, you can visualize the baby steps you can take daily to get there. It’s in these baby steps where your new normal will slowly start to replace your old normal and success will start to replace failure.