Obsess over the inches in your life and you’ll love your mileage you’ve covered looking backwards.
Obsess over your milestones in life and your inches will frustrate you, be overlooked, and probably under appreciated.
Aim small. Miss small.
The business buzz at the moment is all about how to get you, your message, your idea, or your product to go viral.
But why chase what can’t be caught when you can attract a following, that will eventually become contagious, by becoming only what you were meant to become?
Like it or not, we are all magnets attracting those that share in our likeness across all canvases of life. And just because that sounds cliché doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
Purpose, experience, meaning, and fulfillment will never happen with you constantly captaining a game of ‘tag, you’re it.’
I found an excerpt over the weekend from a letter that Albert Einstein wrote to his eleven year old son in 1915. At that time Einstein was thirty-six. He wrote…
…I am very pleased that you find joy with the piano. This and carpentry are in my opinion for your age the best pursuits, better even than school. Because those are things which fit a young person such as you very well. Mainly play the things on the piano which please you, even if the teacher does not assign those. That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes. I am sometimes so wrapped up in my work that I forget about the noon meal. . . .
There’s a lot of beauty unfolding here in these words. For one, Einstein is promoting the creative. Could it be that we learn more while our imagination is decoding the world around us then we do reading what has already been decoded? Secondly, he asks his son to shelf the sheet music and get lost in and with the keys of the piano. What romance there is in the three-step waltz of work, art, and possibility. And lastly, Einstein reveres time. He’s aware of just how holy it is and how today is all that is confirmed in our stories.
Of course we can’t always accomplish such a feat, but what a worthy goal of our days to enter into moments where we fully pursue our art, our parenting, our leading, and our serving with such holiness that we lose track of time, but walk away with a vault of codes as to how things are.
LTMP.
It begins with a decision.
We must decide to begin, venture out, leave the cave, and start.
A start never starts in a cave of Indecision, and rarely is there something not pulling at us to start towards. The cave is a great place to listen, but some point a decision must be made to leave.
We’ve got some decisions to make don’t we?
We’re after music, after all, and very rarely – maybe never – are things not moving, bending, or stretching to make this music we’re all after.
Listen, decide, let it play.
Listen, decide, let it play.
Listen, decide, let it play.
Life doesn’t bring you successful moments. It brings you moments with the opportunity for your successful navigation.
Your role in success is in the preparation.
At some point the moment of inspiration will hit, an opportunity will present itself, or you’ll land on the spot lit stage to experience, perform, or produce something successful.
It’s precisely at that moment we will notice where you, your mind, and your actions have been over time.
We all live in a proverbial gym. Don’t let the tv’s distract you from the treadmill.
Ashton.Gustafson 