On Thursday this week, Barry and I are doing a live two-on-one interview with Patrick Combs, “Mr. Good Think” himself.
I wrote an article about Patrick’s drive to succeed, and never-say-die attitude, over on the Masters of the Secret blog.
I start off the article by saying:
We all know them; people who just don’t like to see other people happy, or achieve big things, who will always tell you why it can’t be done.
Why you’ll fail.
Why you should give up before you get started, and, above all, “keep the day job.”
And yet, those of us who dream big — to the point that our dreams are bigger than even our own minds can conceive — just refuse to listen to those naysayers, as hard as it is sometimes.
Who are they to steal our futures — the lives we want to manifest for ourselves?
But… what about when those “naysayers” or “dream stealers” are really the people you love — who love you back — and just want to make sure you don’t get hurt?
What if they truly have your best interests at heart?
Do you listen to them then?
And then I reference an article from Patrick’s GoodThink.com website, a story which tells about his ironic journey struggling to be accepted as a storyteller, and the amazingly synchronistic manifestation that came as a result of never giving up.
You can read my whole article on the Masters of the Secret blog here…
I’ve spent my life doing the same thing; refusing to give up, no matter how rocky the road got, no matter how many roadblocks were on that road, and no matter how many times I tripped on those roadblocks and scraped my knee.
I decided when I was a teenager that I wanted to be a model, even though I had bad skin, crooked teeth and frizzy hair (heck, it was the 80s, we all had frizzy hair). I was also about an inch shorter than you’re “supposed to be” if you want to model professionally.
But eventually, after knocking on enough doors and following enough instructions regarding what I needed to do to make it, I accomplished that goal, and was represented by the #1 modeling agency at the time in the biggest city in Canada; in fact, it was the same modeling agency that represented Carrie-Anne Moss, and she was my personal mentor for a few weeks before going off to hit it big in Hollywood (she’s best known for the lead female role in The Matrix series).
Then I decided that I wanted to be an actor, and went through the same process to become accepted as that.
Then I decided that I wanted to be myself on camera; not necessarily news, but a TV show host. It took a few months, and knocking on even more doors, but I was given my own show (which I started producing two months after starting to host it) called WORD, a popular local magazine show that I did for over three years.
Then I wanted to write for magazines, and did that. Then I wanted to work in radio, and did that. Then I wanted to be a news anchor, and did that.
The point is, at every step I was told why I couldn’t do it; but I persevered and did it anyway.
I’m working right now on my Success Unwrapped series of books, starting with Season 1. It’s all the transcripts of the interviews that I did for my online talk show, with chapter intros and extros telling why I did the interview and what I learned from it (and, hopefully, what the reader can learn from it too).
I was just working on the first interview I did for the show, which was with a radio and voiceover professional named Kenny Caughlin. His stories of succeeding against the odds, and turning negatives into positives, remind me of the path I took as well.
Bottom line is, there’s no way to make it if you’re not willing to jump the hurdles.
One of my favorite takeaways from all the interviews I’ve done came from Christen Resmo, a life coach in Denver. She says:
Wall means jump!
And what that means is, we tend to stop when a wall is put in the way of our path. But horses just sail right over them; to them, wall doesn’t mean stop, wall means jump.
And if we can jump more walls, we’ll all be a lot further ahead.
Keep Unwrapping the Mysteries of Life!
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