On the last day of 2014, in Cape Town, Eve Fairbanks, a journalist, decided to learn how to surf. She had often heard the surfers around her talk about, ‘finding out who you are on the board.”
She wanted to discover for herself what this experience was all about.
Her experience can be distilled down to this:
As an amatuer she thought that her success was highly dependent on skill. “Our first mistake, she said is to focus too much on the specific skills we think are required to become a good surfer.”
[As amateurs] We think we need to acquire a certain amount of strength, sklll, and muscle memory. We need to try harder, get stronger, learn more from our mistakes.
After mixed success and failure, her teacher told her that at some point she just had to “decide to stay on the board.”
“It was astonishing to experience how great a difference simply making that decision and being tenacious about it made. Where I’d been falling most of the time, I began to catch every wave. Pleasure built upon pleasure, the certainty of my ability amplifying with each new trial.”
Yes, we need skill, practice and knowledge. But often not nearly as much as we think.
And often is the case that we reference these things as far more important than they are because we've yet to just decide.
Where you long for better or more, you have to first decide it shall be.
And like Fairbanks on her surfboard we have to both decide (to stay upright) AND be tenacious about it.
This is precisely what Napoleon Hill calls definiteness of purpose and is the Master Key to all that we desire.
Whether you’re considering what you want from this moment, this day or this next season of your life, both the outcome you desire and your experience achieving it is determined by your definiteness.
You have way more power than you think, without having to first learn or improve a single thing.
It’s as simple as popping up on your surfboard. This scene kills me! Is it foolish or genuis? I'm pretty sure it's both.
PS: I woke up to yet another two hour school delay this morning. Which means my youngest doesn’t leave the house until almost 11A. Ugh...it messes with my entire day. Welcome to every. single. day. of mothering for an entire year now.
After my initial wave of frustration, I decided I was going to leverage this two hour window to bust out a piece of writing. Voila, today’s post is the result.
Deciding what you shall do; it allows you access to another level of power and possibility.
Whenever I am stuck and frustrated this is the place I come back to with myself, “But have I really decided?”
Usually when I’m not happy with what’s happening I haven’t made a clear enough choice. (And assumed the tenacious stance of a lion.)
ROAR!!!
What choice are you dying to make like a lion?
xx Lori
For added fun...this is what the simple act of deciding looks like. Now go sell that house today my friend.
PPS: Quick decisions hold more power than hemming and hawing. #justsaying