The Breaking Point
When you decide to go out to achieve some kind of goal there’s one of two possible outcomes. You either achieve it or you don’t. Maybe you regroup and try again or maybe you give up. But the reason for every failed strategy is that you reached what I call the breaking point.
photo credit: Emily VanWormer
The breaking point is either the point in the strategy that for some reason no longer fitted with who you are or what you wanted to do. And so you jumped off course before reaching your goal.
Or it’s the point where the design of the strategy proved to be flawed and so failed to reach you, your goal, even though you followed it’s lead.
Most of us live our lives by default and so we become overwhelmed by trying to satisfy a number of contrasting demands. This strategy doesn’t work so we get stressed when we hit our tolerance level for coping. That’s the breaking point for that strategy.
Maybe you seek to be loved by pleasing others. The breaking point for this strategy is when you have to choose who to please or when pleasing someone else means sacrificing your own happiness.
A robust strategy that will always work is based in purity.
Google’s unwavering dedication to providing more and more relevant search results works. Other search engines lost because they became less pure as they balanced the need to cash in.
Tiger Woods has been dedicated to winning at golf all his life. Nothing has got in his way and distracted him from winning. I’m sure there are other Golfers potentially as talented, but who had more balanced lives.
Dominoes Pizza stood out from countless other competitors because of their pure focus on speed of delivery.
photo credit: stu_spivack
Buddha focused only on enlightenment, overcoming the distractions of both comfort and self denial.
When you have a strategy that works, if you follow it purely, you will succeed. If you dilute your strategy, you will fail.
If your strategy fails, you learn from it and redesign a better, more robust strategy.
For example, we commonly think of strategy as something to be used in a military, business or team setting.
An army can seek to outnumber, bombard, siege or exhaust an enemy.
photo credit: pingnews.com
A business seeks to be the cheapest, the best quality, the most accommodating, the most convenient or the most advanced.
A sports team can aim at having individual skills or being a solid hardworking team.
photo credit: Lori Greig
But the quickest way to failure is to try to do them all.
What does any of this have to do with you?
Well you want to be loved, admired and respected, don’t you?
Not only that, but you want to be the most loved, admired and respected by certain people, such as your Parents, Partner, Children and Boss etc, don’t you?
And to be loved, admired and respected, you have to stand head and shoulders above all others for something. You can stand out as the prettiest, the most understanding, the brightest, the most fun, the most romantic, the most loving etc.
But if you follow the herd, which most of us do, trying to be as good as John at that or as naturally whatever as Jane at this, you’ll end up mediocre at a lot of things and blend into the anonymous crowd.
You have to have a strategy for life. Not because you’ll get the girl, or because it will fill the gap for the way your Father never loved you. But because it is what you are.
You were built and designed to fit into the mosaic of life. But we are all so busy, trying to make ourselves copies of some other square that the space we would complete lays empty.
photo credit: johannesfreund
You are what you are. Not by mistake. But by design.
If you are unhappy with what you are, it is only because you do not see what you could be. What you could be cannot be seen in the world, because otherwise you would not be. What you can be can only be found by looking within.
Purity, by which I mean the integrity between what you feel and what you do, is the way to find you. Compromise is selling your soul for a trinket or a compliment. Stay pure and you will find your way to the edge of evolution and you will find behind you a crowd who love, admire and respect you as the leading example at whatever it is that you are designed for.
But by then you will not care about the love, admiration and respect for you will understand that purity has it’s own reward, with a value far beyond anything anyone else can give you.
Want an example?
Jesus pushed the strategy of only responding with love beyond all limits.
Now what is your strategy that you can follow with equal zeal?
