Do Your Surroundings Enrich Your Life?
November 4th, 2015 // 11:33 am @ Scott Manning
I believe you cannot trick your subconscious mind. I don’t really care what you believe and you don’t have to care what I believe. But I do know this: it’s damn hard to be prosperous if you are surrounded by un-prosperous things.
The mind, body, and spirit needs (emphasizing the word needs) nourishment.
When it comes to your daily action, your persistence, your energy, your ability to pursue your goals, objectives and ambitions relentlessly is, I believe, linked directly to your psyche and its belief system, its initiative, and its positivity. The degree of your success and growth of your potential is based on how you feed your mind.
You simply must take time to relax, recharge, refocus, rejuvenate. It’s a necessity. Kind of like getting a running start…you deserve to be at your best; 100% of your best goes so much farther for a short period of time than 50% or even 70% of your potential steadily over a longer period of time.
Business is about momentum, profit is about leverage, your success is about the peak of the mountain not walking circularly around the sides of it.
So many people start and stop, go back up and fall back down instead of holding their ground and pacing themselves so they can stay at 100% longer than going all out and every time working at a point of diminishing returns.
Take swimming as example. If you swim without taking a breath and go until exhaustion and then it will take more energy and time to catch your breath, then you do it again and again and again eventually you will pass out and you can’t go further.
If on the other hand you come up for a breath between every stroke or every few strokes, you can outlast yourself on your best day because you took time to recharge as you went instead of at a point of pure exhaustion.
Smart people get this. Desperate people do not.
You must get out of the point of desperation and hustle for the sake of it and learn the art of momentum and the science of pace.
My brother and I have long accomplished more in a quarter than most do in an entire year. That’s 12 months in 3 because we pace ourselves allowing for focus in the moment and compounding over time.
This is my point and how I tie together your surroundings and how you rest and recharge. You will only be as successful as your surroundings inspire you.
I don’t care how humble or modest you think you are…everyone has something that is their motivation and it’s needed. No motivation = no success.
Travel. Family. Hobby. Passionate obsession of some sort. Collecting things. You can for a time even be focused on money…but I don’t recommend it because money will move to you like wet cement quickly becoming like rock.
It won’t seem like it at the time but soon you will feel sluggish, held back, bogged down, and then anchored and weighted to the floor of reality instead the mountain of possibility.
This past weekend I spent time with my brother and our wives in the mountains of North Carolina. We stayed at the Biltmore Estate. And if you haven’t been, gosh you simply have to go. You must. Not because of the extravagance although that’s reason enough, not because of the history, not even because of the nature, rather because of the possibility, the creativity, the vision.
Actually it’s a story of very tragic things experienced by a family who built the greatest fortune in the country, The Vanderbilt’s, and then one generation expanded it and the rest of the generations have wasted it because they lacked ambition and vision and inspiration.
One Vanderbilt did something at least others could enjoy, he created the Biltmore Estate and while it did nothing to serve the family fortune, it was built and created out of his inheritance.
He was known to be the nicest person and the workers who kept the estate pristine fought for the honor to work there and today that exact feeling still exists amongst the people who do the same thing for the visitors from around the globe.
When he began he had barren farmland to work with and he transformed it into a majestic artistry of nature. Literally living on an estate of artistry that used it’s surroundings as inspiration.
You can’t help but be in awe and inspired by the estate and the environment that has been created. But George Vanderbilt had only one part of the equation, he created a living space and the surroundings that people would come from continents away but he had no purpose, no motivation, nothing left to strive for and that became the beginning of the diminishment of their fortune and family empire.
Most people are the opposite, they have some ‘thing’ they seek or try to pursue but they live in a constant state of underwhelming vision and overwhelming tasks.
There is reason why the richest people have the nicest things. You can call it what you want and I’m not an advocate of squandering money, being wasteful or self-indulgent – though I do not judge and people who do judge usually have the least because instead of working they are being critical of others. You can’t do both.
What you must have is places for money to go, things to rev up your desire, and vice versa. People who work endlessly and never stop to enjoy the journey they are on never realize that business is like a vehicle it needs gasoline and you can’t run it dry and then stop and fill it up, you have to fill it up before it runs dry so you can keep going and build on your momentum.
Here’s the best advice I know to give that has ever crossed my path…
First from the great Jim Rohn who said, “If you were going where I am going you would be in a hurry too…”
Be going somewhere. Great advice. And be in a hurry. Life’s too short. You’ll get so many more places.
Next from the family I have just talked about…one of the Vanderbilt’s had said
“Inherited wealth is a real handicap to happiness… It has left me with nothing to hope for, with nothing definite to seek or strive for.”
Money and success will only follow definite purpose, pursuit, a mission in which you are striving for something, the greater the bolder the grander the better and the best news of all: you get to be the judge.
My now famous saying in certain circles of clients is that you must from time to time “slow down to speed up” more on that next week. It follows this exact principle and lifestyle plan of taking time to pause, relax, recharge, refocus, and assess what you are in pursuit of, where you are going, and how you are getting there. Success, as the saying goes, is not a destination, fall victim to this mistake and you and your business and all the opportunities that come with it will soon shrivel up and die.
Category : Blog
