Don’t Quit
So many people quit in life and it becomes a pattern. I’ve hired hundreds of direct sales people over the years. I watched the people that quit within the first three days or first week. I’m like, great, they’re going to move on to go and make money somewhere else. Then you watch how they handle that next position. Maybe it isn’t as hard, maybe it’s harder, but it’s, they’re building these patterns of quitting. So, ask yourself, am I going to rewrite the pattern that I had previously created and my inability to stick something out? If I say I commit for this full summer. Well, then I commit for the full summer. You know? I remember that first year selling and calling my mom, I almost wanted to quit. It was the after the first week. I was like, I’m done. This sucks. I vividly remember my mom being like “Taggarts aren’t quitters.” She told me that if you said you’re going to go out and sell this summer, then you’re going to go out and do it. I was just like, okay, I won’t quit. And so, no matter if it was up, down, bad, good weather, whatever it was, I’m going to stick this out. That is just how I was raised.
Napoleon Hill in “Think and Go Rich” talked about three feet from gold. This kind of three feet from gold analogy where it, it comes from the young man, during the gold rush, after mining away, at Colorado gold mine from many months, he finally quit. He sold all of his machinery equipment to the junk man. He’s like, I’ve been mining and mining and mining, and I haven’t struck gold. And then the junk man who sought council prior to resuming, resuming, digging, digging his engineer, advised him the gold would be found just three feet from where the previous minor had stopped. This concept of like, you, you go until you find the gold. And a lot of times, like we don’t realize that every hit, you know, if you think of like chiseling, if I’m chiseling at marble, I hit it 99 times and I don’t see any crack, but it’s the hundredth hit that finally cracks the marble. Well, was it the hundredth hit that cracked the marble or was the combination of all the 99 where I saw no result that actually created the impact on the marble? So often we forget that principle of just many hits and repetition, even though we don’t see the results that we want. it is still a part of that process.
Don’t Fear Commitment After Loss
Let’s talk about abandonment. I’m going to tread lightly with this, but I’m going to share something that may be a little vulnerable for me. So often people fear letting us down, right? So it’s like, oh, I don’t wanna let you down. Or we fear other people letting us down. It goes both ways, right? Employees quitting, to relationships crumbling, to parents separating, to you’re counting on somebody do a specific job, and then you’re like, oh wow, you let me down. Or me, I don’t wanna let my dad down because he expects the world of me. We get trapped in opportunities and relationships in fear of hurting others. It’s like, man, this relationship has really a bad energy because it is actually encompassed through fear. What happens is we kind of live misaligned and living incarcerated because of this fear mentality of letting people down or fear of getting into a relationship and then being let down. So, a lot of people that are afraid of commitment. They’re like, well, my last relationship didn’t work well, or my last employee didn’t work well. So, why would I even try again? That’s a huge set back for true development. When you think of quitting or being let down or a loss, you know?
Never Abandon Yourself
I just went through nine years of marriage and I got divorced not too long ago. It was hard cause I’ve got three little girls. They’re my angels, my princesses, six, five, and almost two. There was this time where I was kind of trying to explain; how do you explain that to a six year old? How do you say like, Hey, we’re not going be together now. You’re going to have mom’s life and then you’re going to have dad’s life. We’re going to be living separate. I think the four and the two year old were like, yeah, ok. They didn’t really comprehend it. But, my six year old she’s a lot more empathetic. She’s a lot more emotional. What was interesting is, I’m sitting there one night lying in bed and I’ve, my whole life, like the natural thing to say would be, you’re never going to lose me. The natural, I don’t want to speak for every parent that would, you know, you might have a different opinion on this. So, that’s why I’m trying to just tread lightly. But, I’m just going to say how I handled it. Most of the time it’s like you want to say to your kids that you’re never going to lose me, everything’s going to work out perfectly. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you. But, I had this big aha moment where I sat down with Ellie and I just said, look like, you’re going to have people that break up. You’re going to have relationships that you’re going to lose. You’re going to have death. You’re going to have all of that. It is just apart of life and for me to try to coddle you and tell you that everything’s going to be perfect and you’re never going to have anybody leave you is wrong. I kind of like felt like it would bring her more turmoil through life, not understanding this principle. I just said, there’s going to be a time where I’m probably going to leave you and, and you’re going to leave me. You’re going to go to college and you’re going to go get a boyfriend and not care about me in high school. You’re going to be like, I don’t want to have anything to do with you. I’m going to feel like you left me and there will be times where you’re going to feel like I left you or you’re going to spend more time with me or you’re going to spend more time with mom. That’s just part of life. And I said, but the biggest and most important piece is you don’t abandon you. Out of everybody that you have relationships with and out of everybody that you learn and deal with, if you have a practice of never abandoning yourself, never renegotiating with what you are committed to, never jumping out of alignment and leaving your true self, that’s how you really achieve greatness and fulfillment in life. I don’t know how well she comprehended it, but it’s something that I want to instill in my kids as they grow up. Just saying like, Hey, true accomplishment and achievement comes for the ability of never abandoning yourself. We can rely on others. We can count on others. We can trust in others. But, if we can’t do that with ourselves, that’s where life becomes almost a living hell.
Truly Embody Your Goals
There’s Theodore Millon said one response to feeling abandoned is to abandon yourself. So like, if we are always feeling, like people are abandoning ourselves, there’s probably an element of, we just don’t trust ourselves and abandon ourselves. I’d invite you, if you’re listening to this to ask yourself, like, how often have you subconsciously created a pattern or habit where you abandon yourself? There’s a perfect example. I watched so many people who are like, I’m going to sell 300 this year. I’m going to make a million dollars. I’m going to buy this car. Then they end up abandoning their own true goals or they’re setting false goals. They’re just blabbering out things to appease the people they’re telling. But, they don’t truly embody those goals. So, when I truly embody my goals and say, hey, this is my vision, this is what I’m going to accomplish. This is what I’m seeking to achieve. I embody that. Before I tell anyone, I’m telling myself, because I don’t want to tell people, cause when you tell someone, that’s where it gets real. When I’ve really embodied it and said, it’s me and I truly align with this. Then I March on and tell other people because, it’s one thing to get validation from everyone else. But. it’s another thing to get validation from yourself. It’s one thing to be abandoned by everybody else or things or external events happen. But, it’s another thing to abandon herself and renegotiate with that. And it’s been something that I treat sacred. It’s like, I don’t, you know, I remember sitting down with a friend and she was like, Hey, let’s do this vision board thing together. And I was like, I take my vision boards very serious. I almost don’t share those. I would rather do this in private. She was like, what? And I was like, yeah, like for me, I want to really, really embody my own visions. And I don’t want to feel like whatever you are spewing on me and I’m spewing on you is going to affect this future vision because, I take it so sacred. When we’re trying to accomplish things in life, we have got to ask ourselves how much of this is us and how much of this is trying to appease to somebody in our circle or of influence.
