…the ultimate opponent is the warriors own self…To actually overcome one’s own defects is the nature of victory. – Deng Ming Dao, 365 Tao

The biggest obstacle to success is oftentimes ourselves. This is because there is a lot to overcome. We must overcome our fears of getting started. We must put in the effort necessary to master the skills required for our chosen endeavor. We must overcome our fears of success, of thinking that success is for others and not us. We must, of course, overcome our fear of failure and, really, the only way to overcome this is to go out and fail a few times.

It takes courage. It takes courage to get started it takes courage to improve yourself and it courage to fail. It takes courage to do with our lives what we were meant to do with them.

The only way to overcome these fears is to actually go out and dive in and do something. There is no substitute. It doesn’t have to be anything Earth shattering either, it merely has to be something important to us. We must have the courage to do with our lives what we were meant to do with them

After we’ve done this enough we start to realize that true success come from inside, working hard at something worth doing regardless of what the outcome is, because this world is rather random and a lot of what some perceive to be success is out of our hands.

All of us have different defects to overcome. Some may lack patience. Some may have trouble pulling the trigger on chasing a dream. Mine is procrastination. Given the choice between doing something now and putting it off I will put it off. As long as possible, too. I have no qualms about chasing a dream or two, in fact, after doing it my entire adult life it’s rather easy, but few put off things to the last minute like I do.

…the ultimate opponent is the warriors own self…

We are often the biggest obstacle in our path. Once we realize this, we can attack our weaknesses and not run from them. When we do that, we are halfway home to living the life we were meant to live.

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…actually it’s more like golf. You’ve got to go out and do it every day and live by the results. – Garrison Keillor, Love Me

Garrison Keillor is an American humorist. Like all good humorists he not only makes us laugh, he has a point to make, too.

The above thought talks about life, though I forget the characters and the context. It’s true, too. In golf, that deceptively simple, utterly evil game created by Satan on the seventh day while the Big Guy rested, you go out and you hack away. You can’t skip a hole and you keep your own score, too. You always, without fail, get the score you earn.

So it is in life. You have to go out and hack away every day. You can’t skip Wednesday and go directly to Thursday and you keep your own score. While others might have opinions on your life – especially if you are in the public eye – only you can keep an accurate tally of how you are doing. Like golf, we fill out our own scorecards and we tend to get what we’ve earned.

The results tend to speak for themselves, too. Presuming we let them. Some don’t. Some try to expand their success while others try to explain away their failures, as if failure is evil and needs to be distanced. This is silly, because as we’ve noted here before, failure is nothing more than a receipt issued by life showing lookie here, someone tried to improve themselves. Didn’t make it this time, but that’s OK. They’re better than they were before the effort.

You’ve got to go out and do it every day  

Every single one of us can look back and say we are today to a great extent because of what we’ve done in the past. We cannot reach the summit of life without laying the foundation first. It is, virtually always, the winding stair that leads to the top.

… and live by the results.

Similarly, what we do today will determine what we are looking back on five, ten, twenty years from now. Every one of us is issued 24 hours every day. It is the only commodity all of us are issued in equal measure and what we are looking back on years from now depends on how much effort we put into today.

If we want to be looking down from a mountain top, we must put today to good use. Good days lead to good years and the next thing you know you are looking back on accomplishment. However, if we squander our time, we might well be looking up from a valley.

To an extent that might astonish some, the choice is ours.

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[Trees] endure…Theirs is the forbearance of being true to their inner natures…Neither bad fortune nor good fortune will alter what they are. We should be the same way. We may have great fortune or bad, but we should patiently bear both…We must always be true to our inner selves. – Deng Ming Dao, 365 Tao

Some may not think of success in terms of something that must be endured, but it is. Good fortune, like bad fortune, has the potential to alter who we are and how we behave, preventing us from being true to our inner selves.

Success and failure are interesting animals. A lot of our satisfaction or discontent in life stems from these two impostors, but in reality both are nothing more than receipts issued by life showing we tried to improve ourselves. If we tried and succeeded at something, good, Every step forward in life provides a wonderful dividend of confidence. The caveat, of course, is we can’t rest on our laurels: we must exceed ourselves next time.

If we failed, we can either try again later, or, at need, we can realize there is no point to banging our head against the wall, liberating us to try something else.

Success or failure can throw us from our path, but only if we let it. All of us have lives we were meant to live, things we were meant to accomplish, paths we were meant to take. If we let outside influences like mere success or failure affect how we live our lives, we are not being true to our inner selves.

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