Goals & Expectations

Earlier today, I came across an article about Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt) and his amazing quotes from Fight Club. If you haven’t seen it, you need to find a way to see it because this is a movie that will get you motivated. One of his memorable quotes is one that I want to talk about today.

“This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.”

That’s right, guys. After you read this, will have 5-10 minutes less to live your life. The significance with this quote is that when we go out and are so worried about being the perfect worker or the perfect friend or the perfect guy for women, we forget one thing.

No one can be perfect. No one.

Yes, throughout time, baseball pitchers have pitched perfect games and NFL teams have gone an entire regular season without losing even once, but that is in one specific period of time. That period of time will last forever but it’s history and the timeline continues. We need to come to the conclusion that we will never be perfect and the more you worry about trying to be, the less time you will have to just learn and evolve to be who you want to be.

You are going to make mistakes. You are going to fail sometimes. Stop being afraid of those things. Your fear is holding you back from truly succeeding and isn’t that what you want? Success?

In order to truly succeed, you will have to suffer through failure.

I don’t know about you but the more I fail at something, the more likely I will have a breakthrough that will ultimately lead me to my greatest success.

What does this all mean in terms of pick up and self-improvement? When you set goals for what you want out of the experience, your goals should be as specific as reasonably possible. For example, When my girlfriend dumped me a little over a year ago, I said to myself that I was going to work hard for the rest of my life learning to become a better person to prevent [what caused her to dump me] from happening ever again. And I will not stop until I find myself in a state where I can look back and fully believe that I have reached there.

The man I want to be is constantly evolving based on the experiences that I go through everyday I walk out of the front door of my house. Little, subtle changes that will eventually make up the man I will become. And a little over a year later, I can honestly say that I am WELL on my way to getting there. But believe me when I say that I failed many times and succeeded very few times to get where I am now. And that’s where the expectations come in. When you set any goal in life, ONLY expect two things.

  1. You’re going to fail and make mistakes.
  2. You will succeed.

This combines accepting the process and the hard work that is required to get where you want to be and having the focus and confidence in yourself to know that you will eventually get to that success.

You can apply that to every aspect in your life. I do.

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