This weekend was one of those weekends where I had my world view completely flipped on its head, then remolded, then kicked around, and finally hit with about a dozen different layers of paint. In short, I was feeling some burnout and I ended up going to a conference that helped me focus on something I feel is really important. It was also something that I needed to hear and I wanted to share it with you. It's about finding your stride and running your race.
You see, the difficulty in anything that we try to accomplish is that we often don't gauge our success, our progress, our moving forward against ourselves. We measure ourselves against others around us. We look to others and what they've done, where they're going, what they've been able to complete. Then, because it's in our nature, we assess where we stand against where they stand. We start to run our race in accordance to their race. We measure our success against their success, our progress against their progress, and our achievements against their achievements. We're running their race as our own. Unfortunately, we can never win someone else’s race. Why? Because it's not our race to win. More importantly, when we're running their race, we're almost guaranteed to fail at our own. We can't win our race if we're too busy running someone else's.
When we find that we're comparing ourselves to the world around us, all we're really doing is stifling our own progress. This is why it's important to find our own stride. When you, me, all of us are looking straight ahead, staying the course of our lives, the circumstances of others start to have less of an impact on what we do. When we're focused on our lives and what we're accomplishing we gain an amazing insight into who we are and where we're going. We're also more inclined to believe in what we have been able to accomplish.
The reality of the situation is this. If we always look to our left and right, instead of straight ahead, we're never going to get where we're going. The hardest part about any adventure, challenge, or obstacle is to believe in yourself enough to take those steps. Rest assured, if this is your path, there is no one else more qualified for the task than you. There may be others out there who can help guide you on the path, give you good insights to make it a little easier, but no one else can walk your path but you. That means that no one else's path, their race, has anything to do with yours. The moment you take control of the authorship of your own life, and resist the urge to compare your work to those of others, is the moment where you start to grow.
So to all of you, I challenge you to find your stride. Find what makes you happy, find what challenges you, and find the things that drive you forward. When you do, take that next step without the fear of measuring against anyone else other than your own efforts. We'll be here to support you along the way, encourage you, and let you know a few tips if we can, but this is your race, your stride, your path. There will be moments where you fall, moments where things don’t make sense, and moments where things seem overwhelming. Just stop and take a breath, realign, and keep moving. Even the most successful people in the world fail – it’s how they learned to succeed.
Justin