If you want something you don’t have, there are several reasons why you are having trouble acquiring it.
- Lack of Clarity: If you don’t have a very clear picture of what you want, you are not likely to obtain it. You might want more money, but while you might have a few dollars more, it isn’t exactly what you want. You might want a new career, but unless and until you define exactly what that new career needs to provide you, changing your job or your work isn’t likely to give you what you are missing. Because most people don’t do the work to design the life and the outcomes they want with great clarity, they struggle to obtain it. The first thing you need to do is to be specific about what you want.
- Too Little Effort: I have watched The Secret. I am fully aware of the Law of Attraction, the idea that you attract the things you want by manifesting them first in your mind. What seems to be most effective in attracting the things you want is to become the kind of person who could generate the result you want, and the best way for you to become that person is to put forth the massive effort necessary to create the result you want. Too little effort in being more, coupled with minimal effort in doing more, isn’t going to attract anything significant to you. Understanding how to struggle for success involves recognizing that your success is proportional to your effort in becoming more and doing more—a lot more.
- Sporadic Effort: A derivative of the previous point. Putting forth the effort for a day, a week, or a quarter is significant. A day means you have started. A week of consistent effort is the beginning of discipline, and maybe even a habit. A full quarter is a demonstration of your desire to create a higher level of success. But day here and there will produce no result worth noting. A week is an excellent effort unless you let up a week later. The more sporadic your approach, the more the result you want will evade you.
- Unwilling to Change Approach: Some people can’t learn anything. Their learning disability is the fact that they already know everything they need to know. Their beliefs, even the ones that are out of line with reality, are so big as to prevent them from taking in any new information, ideas, strategies, or tactics. They cling to their approach, preferring to believe they are right and that others who are already producing to find success which they want have some natural advantage that was denied to them at birth—or by some set of external circumstances. Because they are unwilling to be wrong and change their approach, they don’t find the success they want. Every success story will include a chapter where the individual had to change what they were doing to succeed, illustrating how to struggle for success by adapting and evolving their approach.
- Desire to Take Shortcuts: Most people want to get rich quick. The rich get that way slowly. Most people that want to get fit would rather take a pill than do the work of creating greater health. Those who want entrepreneurial success want fast growth and a wealth creation event that doesn’t require the hard work and dedication of building and managing a business. The desire to take shortcuts violates the laws of nature. There is no result worth having that doesn’t require time and effort, and sometimes money. Many of the people who chase success spend years avoiding doing the work necessary to produce it than it would have taken for them to do the work and obtain the result they want. You are better off doing the work than trying to cheat success of its payment in full, something it always demands and carefully audits.
- Giving Up Too Soon: There is this cartoon you can find on the internet of two people with picks digging for gold. One is very close to acquiring the gold, but he notices that the other person found gold. So the person who was close to gold moves over to where the other person found gold, even though there is no more gold there. The reason many people don’t find success which they want in some area of their life is that give up too soon. It’s sometimes difficult to tell how close you are to the result you want. You have to persist until you produce the result you want.
If you want success, avoid the things that prevent you from obtaining it.
