“Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent.”
Marilyn Vos Savant
Imagine a 200 lb soccer player sprinting towards you, where you are the only player standing between him and the goal keeper. You know you cannot stop him..but you have to. What do you know?
In professional games, when a defender knows he is beaten, he will intentionally slide into the striker’s feet – fouling them and hoping to knock him down to stop the play.
Often, the striker will get knocked down and the play will reset. But every once in a while … they keep going. And when that happens, Andy Gray yells out…
“He’s been knocked off his stride, but not off his feet!”
The First No
“And that” he finished, “is why this is a better solution.”
He sat back, satisfied that he had made his point and expected to get approval to move forward… but surprisingly his director said no, and waved him off
Puzzled, he returned to his office to reconsider what was wrong with his proposal. After reviewing it, he was sure that he was right – and that his director had made a mistake turning him down.
So he returned to the director’s office, more determined than before, and explained that he couldn’t understand why his proposal had been rejected. He made his case a second time, told the director that he was sure he was right, and wanted to know why it had been rejected.
“Well,” his director told him “every day I have dozens of people who come up to me and believe they have a great idea. Many of these ideas are good, but people simply do not follow through and we end up with a half finished solution. So my policy is simple – I say no to every idea the first time. If you want my support, you have to show me you are not only right – but will finish what you started.”
The director, impressed that he had returned in spite of being rejected now considered the proposal on it’s merits – and ended up approving it.
It’s The Little Things
We like to romanticize the idea of overnight success, overcoming tremendous odds – and a single moment of glory.
But that’s not what success really looks like. Success is really a series of overcoming small obstacles every day in your life. Success is about not being discouraged by the first no, about being able to shake off the small setbacks and keep moving towards your goals.
When you feel frustrated by little things, those are the moments in your life you need to be aware of and take advantage of not as a time to give up – but an opportunity to persist.
The opportunity is not “out there” or coming to you “someday.”
The opportunity is here for you right now, in every moment of your life – and it is in the small obstacles that will trip you up and take your dreams away from you if you let them.
You need to be stronger, instead of making excuses and pretending things are harder than they really are.
You need to be strong enough, that when those setbacks hit you – you can be “knocked off your stride – but not off your feet.“