Today's Meditation:

You get what you get, and while there is always the possibility of asking for more, the fact is that at this moment, no matter where you are or what you're doing, you have what you have, and you have to make do with that.  While limitations often limit our possibilities and make jobs harder to accomplish, they also are a fact of life, and it's the people who push on with what they have at hand who tend to learn how to compensate for limitations and who grow much more accomplished at doing much with little.

I've taken teaching jobs in which I've been put in a classroom with absolutely no textbooks or other materials.  The challenge for me has been to make the time in class worthwhile for the students, for they certainly don't deserve to be wasting their time in a class where they aren't learning anything.  I had the choice of doing what I could to make things work or complaining about the lack of materials and not doing anything in the class.  Had I done the latter I might have gotten materials sooner, but the students wouldn't have gotten anything out of their time with me.  And in making do with limited resources, I learned a lot of strategies that make teaching much, much easier when I do have the materials I need.

Things have always gotten better with time, but we can't wait for that to happen if we want to take advantage of the opportunities of the present moment.  There is a certain attraction to waiting until things will be easier, but there are many benefits to trying to make things work with what you have.  Life rarely offers us situations that are perfectly structured for us to deal with them, and the better we get at dealing with difficult situations, the more effective we'll get at them as time goes on.

Success is a result of choices.  We choose how we go about what we do, and it's completely up to us if we push ourselves or just try to do the bare minimum; if we want to take our success into our own hands or blame circumstances for our lack of success.  And building a history of smaller successes because we don't just wait for conditions to be right can give us a successful career, relationship, or life, when all is said and done.

Questions to consider:

How many people never ever start something they want to do because they're waiting for circumstances to be just right?

Who are some of the most successful people you know?  How do they achieve their success?

Why do we hesitate to start something when it looks like we don't have everything we need to accomplish it?

For further thought:

Success in the important departments of life seldom comes naturally, no more naturally than success at anything--a musical instrument, sports, fly-fishing, tennis, golf, business, marriage, parenthood, landscape gardening.  But somehow people wait passively for success to come to them, living as other people are living in the unspoken, tacit assumption that other people know how to live successfully.

Earl Nightingale

more thoughts and ideas on success

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