Success and life is all about having goals and the motivation behind them in order to make them happen. The two go hand in hand. It’s about the passion and hard work you put into something to eventually get an output. It is the discipline you set for yourself and for what you are doing to make sure that you are always challenging yourself and going way above and beyond your limits.
Clarity is knowing what you are doing and how you are going to do it. Not just simple wishes and goals. It’s your actions that you plan on setting forth. It is about what you are going to do to make this audacious goal a reality. There should never be any ifs in your goal setting. Don't think of a goal as a wish, but rather your future self and the position you plan on putting yourself in.
Sure it sounds a bit cocky and overconfident, but confidence is well needed for what you plan on pulling off in your life. The issue is that most people view goal setting as a wish or as a fairytale rather than a course of action that needs to be taken. We usually look at a goal as something we wish to attain, but not as something we’re going to accomplish. It’s a hope not a foregone conclusion.
Once you make the promise to yourself of never turning back to your old life and moving forward on your goal, there is no fail-safe net to catch you, nor a plan B. It’s just having your eye on the target and knowing what your target actually is.
The burning bridges we are talking about today are not within the relationships in your life, but rather the bridges that you might create in your mind to bring you back to safety after something doesn’t work out or if you fail.
You need to burn bridges if you’re going to succeed.
We need to let go of these bridges to succeed. They are holding us back as they are the safety nets we all have just in case shit hits the fan. They are the back up plan and our secondary course of action to keep us floating by. The plan B we map out in case our business venture is a complete failure. In case the road we’ve embarked on is tougher than we originally thought.
Successful people don't have bridges to a plan B because that just shows they are not confident with their plan A. Your goal should always be to get plan A done and executed the way you intended. Once you stop and move on to plan B and cross that bridge, you have given up on yourself and your hope to achieve your goal.
The terms "if anything" or "worse case scenario" shouldn't even exist in your vocabulary. A bridge, in the way we have described it, is something that you will find missing in all successful people. Their eventual success was an inevitability, whereas so many people who are dreamers see it as a blessing if it is ever attained.
For them, the Richard Branson’s and the Steve Jobs’s of the world, it was a matter of when, not if. "If" is the worst word in the English language because it is a showcase of doubt and uncertainty.
If they failed once, they’d try a second time, and a third, fourth and fifth. Thomas Edison had more than 10,000 failures before creating the light bulb. Ask yourself, how many times are you willing to fail before you succeed? He didn't go to his plan B or cross back over to the bridge, he kept going forward and that is what success is about.
The truth is that many people are not willing to risk losing their comfortable life they have set up for themselves to attain something greater and something that they will actually enjoy having rather than being miserable. This is why so many people end up average, because they are constantly holding onto their bridges back to their safe havens.
People acknowledge that they can fail and are afraid to do so. We see failure as the likely outcome simply because so many have failed before us, or we have failed so many times already. When failure and doubt creep into the mind, the war is already lost and that is when we use our bridge we created in our minds. This is why bridges are so detrimental to our mindsets.
On burning bridges.
Long ago, there was a story of a general who was about to face his greatest and most powerful enemy. One who greatly outnumbered his army. He loaded his soldiers into boats, sailed to the enemy’s country, unloaded soldiers and equipment, then gave the order to burn the ships that had carried them.
Addressing his men before the first battle, he said, “You see the boats going up in smoke. That means that we cannot leave these shores alive unless we win! We now have no other choice – we win – or we perish!” They won.
These soldiers didn't have a back up plan. They didn't think to themselves “if anything and I am about to die or we are about to lose we are just going to jump on our ships and go back home to where we are safe and have supper.” Instead they gave themselves no choice but to win and they did so because their backs were up against a wall not up against a road they can run back to. And that is the way you need to see your journey.
Big dreams and those who tell you, you can’t.
If you look back in history and at the people that managed to become successful, you will realize it is always the underdog and the unlikely characters. Steve Jobs was an orphan, Richard Branson dropped out of school at the age of 13, Abe Lincoln was born into poverty and taught himself how to read.
It always seems to be the outcasts of the world that had no choice but to make it because they refused to accept their current lives for what they were worth and wanted to make something out of nothing. That is the beauty of humanity and the power of the individual.
Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard and failed at his first business before learning from that failure (Traf-O-Data) and creating Microsoft. Oprah Winfrey was born with next to nothing, now she’s the richest woman in the world. It’s more a result of persistent hard work and a refusal to quit than any exceptional talent. And the list goes on…
It’s always funny to hear someone or see someone say you can't do something or give you limitations and explain to you how hard something is. Other people like to determine what you can and cannot do.
Don't ever let the exterior world hold you down because other people can't determine your willpower to get what you want. You can find all the bullshit reasons in the world as to why you cant do something, but that is the single thing that is going to keep you where you are your whole life.
At the end of the day it all comes down to belief. It’s not how much others believe in you or the limits they place on you. It’s based on how much you are willing to take from this world and how hungry you really are. When you tell yourself you can't do something you are creating an illusion in your mind to take you right back over that bridge that you have there as a safety net.
How can you burn bridges on your way to success?
Devotion, clarity and believing in yourself. You don't have to be the most talented or the greatest at your craft, but if you have the ambition and the will power to learn and become the best in your respective industry…then you will get there. Life is all about how far you wish to take yourself. It’s about giving it your all because the moment you don't, your bridge comes into play.
Devote yourself and trust yourself with what you are setting yourself out to do. The only limits you have are the ones that you decide to place on yourself. Your bridges will hold you back unless you get rid of them and have no choice but to succeed.
Preston Waters | Elite.
