Monday, March 16, 2015

An Ironman Moment

To start off with, this post really is not about Ironman but it is about a way to live your life. It is a deliberate choice that is made every day. It is not always easy but it is always worth it.

An Ironman moment in your life is a point in your life that you will never forget.

An Ironman moment is an investment with compounding interest. The series of small choices you make on what you will do to and what you will stop doing to get to your moment all adds up and become greater than the sum of their whole. The more you do, it does not become easier but the impact becomes greater.

The choices become so much greater because with each one, you take a step outside of your comfort zone, which creates a bigger comfort zone. It is a choice to challenge yourself to go further while appreciating where you have been. When I ask people about doing an Ironman, their main response is the fact that they have never swam that far or are not that good of a swimmer. I am not sure how to break it to you but no one knew how to swim when they first started training. If we stopped ourselves from where we were and what our current skills set were, we would never get anywhere. We would never do anything. No one, no matter how great they are was able to swim the whole distance. Apply this outside of an Ironman to your life right now, what is it that you want to do but currently cannot because of where you are? You can spend your entire life focusing on why you cannot get there or you can spend your life figuring out the next step you need to take to get there. One will lead you nowhere while the other will change your life.

People talk about all the time that they will have to dedicate to get there. You are right, it is a lot of time to dedicate and it is worth it. The time will pass anyway; you might as well invest it in doing something that changes your life. Think beyond an Ironman, this applies to every aspect of your life. If you want something you have to work for it and invest the time. I am willing to be that the time you think you will miss, will go unnoticed. You can spend your time working towards your goal or slipping away from it. They both bring challenges, when you work towards your goals, these challenges help you grow, when you choose to ignore your goals these challenges make you feel a fraction of how great you really are.

This moment in your life is about experiencing how truly great you are and not in an arrogant way but in a way that excites you to do more, be more and live more. It is about putting everything on the table and seeing what you are truly made of. It is reaching your limits and breaking them. Most people will never truly understand how great they are, not because they are not courageous enough but because they have been told to settle for just being okay and that doing the least amount of work is all that they need to get by. Take a look around you, everywhere there are hacks and tricks to do less work in less time and supposedly get more from it. I see this all as a lie. I do not believe that you there is any shortcut to true success because in the end, success is not just the end goal but it is the work that went into reaching that goal.

The secret is that you do not have to start with an Ironman but you do have to start somewhere, so whether it is running a 5K, doing your first sprint, switching careers, moving to a different city or whatever you can think of, you just have to start and move forward.

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