This may sound a bit cliche, but it remains true.
Rule Number #1 of Success Club: Don’t Quit
Rule Number #2 of Success Club: Don’t Quit
As long as you don’t quit, you can figure the rest out, even if it’s through trial and error.
Money can’t buy mindset or that willingness to go through the fire in pursuit of something.
So many people spend their time looking for a big secret, but the big secret is that there is no secret.
Take a look at this photo I took earlier today and tell me what you see:
You may see a whole lot of nothing. Maybe you see a long path?
There’s not a lot going on in that photo, right?
Do you know what I see when I look at it? I see opportunity and a way to measure my progress.
Allow me to explain…
I used to be a keen runner but my knees started hurting 12 years ago. I put this down to running so I quit completely (big mistake), mistakenly believing that my running days were behind me and that I was wearing out whatever cartilage I had left.
Something I now know is a misguided belief I had that I never took the time to research.
I didn’t do so much as run to my car (I lifted weights and kept fit but I never ran anywhere).
Just over a year ago now one of my friends, who is older than I am, was telling me how he gets up in the mornings and goes running for over 10km at a time which sounded like something straight out of a book of fantasy to me at the time.
That got me thinking: “If he could run all that distance, then surely I should be able to run to the end of the road“???
Fast forward a few weeks, I was just heading into a supermarket when a woman came bolting out of the door, followed by a security guard. She ran all the way down the road, like the wind, as she was hotly pursued by a guy who wasn’t going to win a track and field event anytime soon.
She had shoplifted a joint of meat and dropped it on the floor in defeat after a prolonged chase. The security guard returned to the store wheezing like an accordion filled with holes, clutching a small joint of meat, which seemed quite an absurd amount of effort for such a small retrieval. No matter, because what I was focusing and wondering about was whether I could run at all or were my knees completely shot.
Running was the thing I had on my mind as oppose to the balance of law and order.
So sooner or later I had to find out.
The following day I was out walking around a track people mainly use to walk their dogs. All of a sudden, this guy on some kind of couch to 5km mission, ran past me. I was wearing normal clothes but I couldn’t wait any longer to test this out, so I began what has been a long journey and quest to be able to run again. As I started to run I winced in pain. My knees hated it and every step forward was a mental battle of pain vs progress.
It continued like that for some time. Every time I ran my knees and my hips flared up in protest.
As I awkwardly moved my legs in a manner that vaguely resembled running (barely a jog really), I started getting closer to this guy that ran past me. Due in no small part to the attire I found myself in it occurred to me that the closer I got, the more I looked like some kind of stalker, which wasn’t the look i was going for.
“Are you following me?”
“Yes, but only because you inspired me and I acted on an impulse”
“To follow me?”
“No, just to see if I could run after 12 years. I’m not very good at this yet but my mind is a champion while my legs resemble quivering jelly”
Like all good humans do, to give myself an edge in terms of joint recovery I wondered if there was a magic pill I could take that would turn me into a track and field superstar (there wasn’t, just as there aren’t magic buttons you can press to make money fall out of the sky). No matter, I started necking back extra supplements including Fish Oil, Glucosamine, MSM and Chondroitin. All I really had to work with was faith in eventual progress as my body was not playing ball and my tendons/ligaments were in some kind of shutdown mode from the sudden onslaught.
Every 2 or 3 days I attempted to do another run even if I was still suffering. I found it easier to go fast than slow, because the jolting of running slow was just too painful. In short, my body didn’t know what the hell was happening to it but I didn’t give it a choice.
Some days I could hardly get out of a chair or walk down the stairs properly. During the Summer months I overdid it and ran intervals for nearly an hour at a time. If I ran downhill I found it was more painful so I found somewhere with an incline in a park which was full of dogs. I kept getting chased by them which wasn’t an enjoyable experience.
“Don’t worry it doesn’t bite”, was a phrase I heard on numerous occasions. One of my friends suggested I should stop running with sausages hanging out of my back pocket.
I saw the funny side…
Another friend suggested running around an athletics track and my initation into this was a 5 kilometre run. Up until this point I had never run 5km in my life and this was September last year, just a few months after I had begun this running journey. I made up my mind when I started that I would not quit until I hit the 5km mark. To do this I convinced myself my life depended on it.
I achieved this goal because I gave myself no other option.
It took nearly a week to recover from the pain of what I’d put myself through.
Slowly but surely my body has begun to adapt. I never stopped believing I would be able to run again, like I used to.
I started alternating between treadmill running and along straights, just like you see in that photo at the beginning of this post.
Slowly I am increasing the duration of each run. I am up to 25 minutes at a time on a treadmill at the time of writing. After that I do weights – the whole thing takes me 75 minutes per session.
The only reason I can do this is because I have a mindset that will not let me quit.
Running outside is even harder, I’m still not where I want to be yet but I am chipping away at this goal and turning my body into something that will resemble a machine.
I have accepted this may take me 2-3 years to achieve this but eventually my body will agree with me and it will be one of my greatest achievements.
I take what I learn from pain and progress with exercise and apply it to other things in my life including sitting down and writing blog posts like this.
My advice to you is no matter where you are at right now you are more capable than you think. You will get to where you want to go in your online business (and in life) as long as you just don’t quit.
Keep learning and never rest on your laurels.
Remember, even internet marketing millionaires started at the beginning with no audience and they made it happen from ground zero.
Keep chipping away until you reach your own personal milestones and goals. The only person you are competing with is YOURSELF.
Here’s a poem about not quitting that I think you may get something from:
“When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,
When the road you’re trudging seems all uphill,
When the funds are low but the debts are high,
And you want to smile but you have to sigh,
When care is pressing you down a bit,
Rest if you must, but don’t you quit.
Life is strange with its twists and turns,
As every one of us sometimes learns,
And many failures turn about
When we might have won had we stuck it out.
Don’t give up though the pace seems slow –
You may succeed with another blow.
Success is failure turned inside out –
The silver tint of the clouds of doubt,
You can never tell how close you are,
It may be near when it seems so far;
So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit –
It’s when things seem worst that you must not quit.” ~ Edgar A. Guest
That poem was written in 1921 and it’s crazy to think that was over 100 years ago now. The poet
was from the same hometown as me as well – what a small world!
On that note I’ll raise a glass to Edgar and you can be sure that I will also see you
in the next post, dear reader.
I hope you had a great day.
PS. When I ran up that hill over the Summer, this is the song that often sprung to mind (Kate Bush rocks):
