Why aim high?

15th January 2022

Queenie looked at the gravy dripping from the table to the floor. No one else had noticed. Her guardians had left the table momentarily after finishing their meal. She licked the gravy off the floor. “It tasted good!” She looked up and saw the remaining leg of lamb. Still, plenty of meat left! She smacked her lips and saliva involuntarily filled her mouth as she now could not only smell but also see the delicious treat. She looked around her. Her guardians were still not around. She then pushed a chair a bit further from the table to give her space to climb onto it. From there, she got onto the dining table and grabbed the juicy leg of lamb. She then deftly leapt off the table and went back to her corner to quietly enjoy her prize.

Queenie was not satisfied with just the gravy. She had a higher goal. With higher preparations using the chair, she was able to obtain higher results.

Are you able to relate that to life or more specifically, your life? Your mind is a powerful tool, so powerful that incredible feats have been achieved in the past, present and future. What the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve. If you look at your life right now and see the things, skills and goals that you have achieved that you did not have before, remember that it all started with a thought in your head. Maybe you wanted to learn a language? Or have a certain job? Perhaps you were looking for a partner or aspired to be a parent. Either way, it started with a thought, a goal in mind before it was manifested into a reality.

Simple goals require little preparation and yield little results. Taking swimming, for example, you can learn swimming in many ways depending what are the results you want. If you want to learn to swim to stay safe so you will drown in a pool or a river, the amount of work put in will be vastly different if you were training to be the best in your school or county. And training for the national swim meet would also be vastly different if you were training for the Olympics. For the former, all you need to do is to attend a few lessons and have a bit of practice before you will be competent in not drowning in a pool. When you are training for the Olympics, what you eat and drink, your lifestyle habits and your mindset all comes into play on top of rigorous physical and endurance training. They are both considered swimming but with different goals, the approach is extremely different and the corresponding results are distinctly dissimilar.

Why is this important? It depends on what you want. There are some people who want more but are unwilling or unaware that they have to put more preparation into the game to yield the results they want. They may be looking at other people’s results and wondering why they have not achieved the same. If they had scrutinized the process of their achievement, it is likely to find that they had prepared more and put in more effort to obtain those results. If you are wanting little results, your goals need not be too big and not much preparation is required.

However, if you are looking for much greater results, your goals have to be much higher. When you do so, it automatically programs your mind to think differently, ask different questions and allow a whole different level of preparation to allow you to achieve that goal.

If your goal is to be the best parent you can be, it requires you to learn more about your children in a way that benefits them (and invariably in the process, yourself), new skills you may require, mindsets shifts (usually ideas to let go rather than new concepts) and a lot more effort than you ever imagined. With all these preparations, you will be closer to receiving the higher result you desire. The same applies to being a great boss/employee, friend or partner. It all starts with how good do you want to be. What is easiest to do is generally what is least valuable to do.

Understand that mediocrity is not about being like others. Mediocrity is not living up to your fullest potential. You may be surprised to find that it takes the same amount of mind power to achieve mediocre results compared to outstanding outcomes. There are many who is happy with ‘make-do’, ‘average’ and ‘good’. Good is the enemy of great. This is not referring to not being grateful or satisfied with what you have. Not at all. Gratitude is paramount. Gratitude is all about appreciating all you have WHILE pursuing more. It allows growth which is one of the human needs we have in life. When you are demanding more of yourself and raising your standards while being extremely grateful for what you have achieved, you automatically expand and grow.

Some may get daunted by large goals. Don’t. Remember the so-called ‘overnight successes’ usually has decades of work behind them. We tend to overestimate what we can achieve in a year and underestimate what we can achieve in ten years. Don’t try to be perfect. Just try to be better than what you were yesterday. Small (seemingly insignificant) daily improvements lead to enormous success over time. Think big but act small.

When you start aiming for higher goals, your mind will shift with you accordingly to allow higher levels of preparation and thus increase your chances of receiving higher results. You may open up parts of your brain or mind that you have not done so before. You will learn that what got you here is not going to get you there. You will find new strategies and novel ways of thinking and doing things. You will learn the meaning of resourcefulness, drive, determination and effectiveness. You may experience paradigm shifts as well, changing you forever.

Learn to balance being satisfied and grateful for all you have and achieve with staying hungry and wanting to grow. When you start growing like this, you will also invariably improve and bring all those around you up with you as you lead by example. At a micro level, you will see greater results that you never had and have a sense of achievement. On a macro level, your world will improve with all the people around you growing as well, providing a sense of fulfilment.

Queenie wanted more, did more and thus, received more. What do you have to do to get more in your life?

‘Set a goal so big that you can’t achieve it until you grow into the person who can.’

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