Imagine a life with no regrets. What does that look, taste, feel, and sound like to you? We’ve all had some form of failure in our lives and we all deal with failure differently. Why is it that some people have failure yet push through on their journey?
These are some of the questions, I find myself asking lately as I exam my life. As Gary Keller, states in his book The ONE Thing:
“Success is an Inside Job”
He illustrates the depth of that truth with a simple and beautiful story about a boy.
One evening, a young boy hopped up on his father’s lap and whispered, “Dad, we don’t spend enough time together.” The father, who dearly loved his son, knew in his heart this was true and replied, “You’re right and I’m so sorry. But I promise I’ll make it up to you. Since tomorrow is Saturday, why don’t we spend the entire day together? Just you and me!” It was a plan, and the boy went to bed that night with a smile on his face, envisioning the day, excited about the adventurous possibilities with his Pops.
The next morning the father rose earlier than usual. He wanted to make sure he could enjoy his ritual cup of coffee with the morning paper before his son awoke, wound up and ready to go. Lost in thought reading the business section, he was caught by surprise when suddenly his son pulled the newspaper down and enthusiastically shouted, “Dad, I’m up. Let’s play!”
The father, although thrilled to see his son and eager to start the day together, found himself guiltily craving just a little more time to finish his morning routine. Quickly racking his brain, he hit upon a promising idea. He grabbed his son, gave him a huge hug, and announced that their first game would be to put a puzzle together, and when that was done, “we’ll head outside to play for the rest of the day.”
Earlier in his, he had seen a full-page ad with a picture of the world. He quickly found it, tore it into little pieces, and spread them out on the table. He found some tape for his son and said, “I want to see how fast you can put this puzzle together.” The boy enthusiastically dove right in, while his father, confident that he had now bought some extra time, buried himself back in his paper.
Within minutes, the boy once again yanked down his father’s newspaper and proudly announced, “Dad, I’m done!” The father astonished. For what lay in front of him – whole, intact, and complete – was the picture of the world, back together as it was in the ad and not one piece out-of-place. In a voice mixed with parental pride and wonder, the father asked, “How on earth did you do that so fast?”
The young boy beamed. “It was easy, Dad! I couldn’t do it at first and I started to give up, it was so hard. But then I dropped a piece on the floor, and because it’s a glass-top table, when I looked up I saw that there was a picture of a man on the other side. That gave me an idea!”
“When I put the man together, the world just fell into place.”
This little story and the truth of how the boy solved the puzzle was so profound to me, that I started crying because I knew it was true. “Success is an inside job.” We all instinctively know this, yet we resist it and push-off the work. We procrastinate with sex, movies, drugs, food, alcohol, video games and even things like cleaning the house.
I’m committing to the process of mastering myself to become the best version of myself, I know that it won’t be easy. Doing what is easy doesn’t always give you joy. Joy is often found in the work, the process and the progress. I hope that you enjoyed this story as much I did. I look forward to sharing my finding from the journey of my inside job.