Message 345
“Our perceptions determine, to an incredibly large degree, what we are and are not capable of. In many ways, they determine reality itself. When we believe in the obstacle more than in the goal, which will inevitably triumph?”
He said jobs learned early in life that reality was falsely hemmed in by rules and compromises that people had been taught as children
We don’t control reality but our perceptions do influence it.
How do we usually deal with an impossible deadline handed down from someone above us?
We complain. We get angry and sulk thinking “how could they? What’s the point ? Who do they think i am?
We look for a way out and feel sorry for ourselves
None of these things affect the objective reality of that deadline. Not in the way that pushing forward can.
Jobs refused to tolerate people who didn’t believe in their own abilities to succeed.
He pushed people through what others thought were hard limitations.
We can,like Steve Jobs, learn to reject the first judgments and the objections that spring out of them because those objections are almost always rooted in fear.
We’ve been taught to be realistic and to listen to feedback and to compromise.
What if the other party is wrong? What if they are too conservative?
What holds us back? The all too common impulse to complain, defer and give up. That’s what.
We all have the ability to break through these externally imposed limitations. If you’re given what seems to be an unfair task, see it as a test to see what you are made of.
What’s it going to hurt if you give it your best? What if you make it work? How special that will be.
And what if you dont succeed? So what? Keep trying. Find a different way.
After all Seneca said “a good person dyes events with his own color….and turns whatever happens to his own benefit”.
