THE FORCE OF MOTION
Mediocrity vs. Exceptionalism
When I was in school, many years ago… I remember studying Sir Isaac Newton. Specifically, I remember Newton’s Third Law of Motion. Simply stated, when one body exerts a force on another body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction to that of the first body. In other words, for every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. This principle is seen in our everyday life when we walk across the floor. As we walk, our body pushes against the floor and the floor pushes back, propelling us forward across the room.
This fixed principle of nature does not apply solely to the physical aspects of life; this law also applies to many of the unseen and non-physical parts of life. To achieve your goals, you also have to push down against the realities that constrain you. Whether talking about physical momentum or life momentum, you cannot propel yourself upward without pushing downward.
Your success in life will be directly proportional to the effort you exert toward the achievement of that success. The obstacles that you encounter in life are there to provide you with the forward momentum you need to achieve great things for yourself, but you must learn to push against these obstacles in order to gain momentum from them by utilizing the opposite force they were designed to create for you.
Remember, anything worthwhile is readily available to the one who will embrace it and is willing to pay the price to attain it. Every great achievement is protected by a high wall of hard work, sacrifice, risk, and delayed gratification. Each person succeeds or fails according to his or her own capacity to visualize where they are going with their life, to force themselves to do what is necessary to begin and compete their journey. Vision alone won’t guarantee success.
Are you ready to break out of the rut of mediocrity and rise to a level of exceptionalism that distinguishes you from 96% of the population? There are things you can do to propel yourself forward. I talk about them in chapter 6 of Mindset Matters. There are ways we can learn to control our thoughts, attitude, limited thinking, wastefulness of resources, and mental laziness. Check out this chapter in Mindset Matters. If you can change your thinking, you can change your world.