Success is almost always a surprise. It seems to come when least expected. It is elusive. “I’ll know it when I see it,” I tell myself.
It’s been my experience that success, or that point when success is realized, is almost always discovered in hindsight, almost never in foresight.
“Too stupid to learn anything,” was how Thomas Edison’s school teachers characterized him….Oprah Winfrey was fired from her first television show….Vincent Van Gogh only sold one painting during his lifetime.
I had a dream of being a golf course superintendent with a million-dollar budget overlooking the Pacific Ocean on the coast of California.
When I was twenty-five I had that. I was a golf course superintendent at a golf course in California. We had a million-dollar budget. The course was at 700 feet elevation, overlooking the beach at Santa Monica. My dream came true.
Except for one problem, I didn’t know it. Because my original version of the goal (dream) was that the golf course was on the Monterey Peninsula in California. It would be Spyglass Hill Golf Course or Pebble Beach Golf Links.
For more than two years, while working as a golf course superintendent at the course overlooking Santa Monica, I still wanted to be on the Monterey Peninsula. One day, watching the waves break onto the beach at Santa Monica, I suddenly realized and exclaimed to myself, “You idiot! Here you are on a golf course overlooking the Pacific Ocean with a million-dollar budget. You have your dream. You achieved your goal more than two years ago and you’ve been kicking yourself in the butt trying to get to Monterey?!”
It suddenly dawned on me that the biggest obstacle to achieving my goals is my paradigm.
Change your paradigm, and you change your life.