Brick Walls

“Brick walls are not there to keep us out; brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.”
Randy Pausch

For most of us obstacles are very frustrating. We don’t like to see them. We are sure that they are keeping us from obtaining our goals so we resent them for being there. How dare anything make it difficult to get what I want. We want it to be easy to acheive our goals. The quicker and the less work we have to do the better. But if it was quick and easy to acheive our goals, they would not be satisfying to us and we would not value our acheivements much.

Obstacles don’t have to stop us from acheiving what we want. Generally when they do it is because we don’t beleive in our abilities or because we don’t beleive in our goal. Many of us lack self-confidence. We are secretly looking for reasons why we can’t accomplish something, in order to prove to ourselves that we aren’t good enough, and any obstacle makes a convenient excuse. We expect to fail so we do fail, because we let our obstacles stop us from succeeding.

Like everything else in our life, our obstacles are sent to us in order to teach us a lesson about ourselves. They are not sent to us in order to annoy and frustrate us. They are sent to us to demonstrate to ourselves just how serious we are about obtaining our goal. The truth is that if we are really determined to succeed, and are completely focused on our goal, we won’t even notice those obstacles. They won’t be a problem. We’ll just ignore them and brush them aside. Instead of complaining about the problem, we’ll be working on the solution. We’ll be strategizing and planning the answers to any challenges and creating systems to make sure the problem doesn’t come up again. We’ll successfully acheive our goal.