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PART 5:
HOW TO KICK SOME ASS
CHAPTER 23:
THE ALMIGHTY DECISION
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back,
always ineffectiveness. The moment one definitely commits oneself, then
providence moves too.
—W.H. Murray; explorer, mountain climber, committer
The story goes that when Henry Ford first came up with the idea for his V-8
motor, he wanted the engine to have all eight cylinders cast in one block. I
have no idea what that means, but apparently it was a tall order because his
team of engineers was like, “Bitch, you crazy!” He told them to do it anyway,
and off they grumbled to toil away at it, only to come back and inform him that
it was impossible.
Upon hearing this news, Ford told them to keep at it, no matter how long it
took. He was all, “I don’t want to see your faces until you bring me what I
want,” and they were all, “We just proved it can’t be done,” and he was all, “It
can be done and it will be done,” and they were all, “Can not,” and he was all,
“Can so,” and they were all, “No way,” and he was all, “Way,” so off they went
again, this time for a whole year, and . . . nothing.
So they go back to Ford and there’s lots of tears and finger-pointing and hair
pulling and Ford sends them off again, and tells them it will be done again and
then, in the lab, somewhere between folding origami swans out of their notes
and making fart noises every time someone mentions the word “Ford,” his
engineers do the impossible. They discover how to make his eight-cylinder
engine block.
This is what it means to make a decision for reals.
When you make a no-nonsense decision, you sign up fully and keep moving
toward your goal, regardless of what’s flung in your path. And stuff will most
definitely get flung, which is why making the decision is so crucial—this shit
is not for sissies. The moment it gets hard or expensive or puts you at risk of
looking like a moron, if you haven’t made the decision, you’ll quit. If it wasn’t
uncomfortable, everyone would be out there all in love with their fabulous
lives.
So often, we pretend we’ve made a decision, when
what we’ve really done is signed up to try until it
gets too uncomfortable.
Henry Ford didn’t even make it past the sixth grade and there he was,
bossing around a bunch of the world’s biggest engineering smarty-pants,
setting himself up to look like a total idiot by spending large amounts of
money and time on the proven impossible.
Ford was determined. And he trusted his gut and his vision more than the
small thinking of others. He’d made the decision that he would have his engine
the way he would have it and nothing was going to stop him.
This is why the decision is so important. If you had an idea and had to go up
against a roomful of people who “knew better” than you did, and demand they
do what you say in spite of all the proof they had against you, would you stick
to your guns? Or if you needed tens of thousands of dollars to start your new
business, and the only person you could think of to ask was your scary, rich
uncle who never remembered who you were even though you saw him every
Christmas, would you ask him for it? Or if you were sick of feeling fat and
unsexy and out of shape and the only time you could make it to the gym was at
5 a.m. on freezing winter mornings when you were all snuggly in bed, would
you go? If you made the decision that you were going to reach your goals, you
would do whatever it took. If you merely wanted to, but hadn’t made the firm
decision to, you’d roll over and begin convincing yourself that your life is fine
just the way it is.
This is where being connected to your desire and Source Energy, and having
an unshakable belief in the not-yet seen, is so critical. There are plenty of times
when we get a brilliant idea and it temporarily fails or it pushes us into
unfamiliar territory. If we don’t have a strong connection to the truth—we live
in an abundant Universe, we are awesome, glorious and tear-jerkingly lovable,
etc.—a blazing desire, and an unflinching belief in our own vision before it’s
manifested, we’ll fall prey to our own fears and everyone else’s fears that it’s
not possible and give up, instead of course-correcting or pushing on through
and bringing it to life. As Winston Churchill so aptly explained, “Success
consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”
Nobody gets to the top of the mountain without
falling on his face over and over again.
By the way, back when Henry Ford insisted to a roomful of annoyed
engineers that his V-8 engine could be built the way he envisioned it, it was
after he’d already gone bankrupt in his first attempt at creating an automobile
empire. So at that time, he already had plenty of proof that he was capable of
failing on a massive scale, but his faith in himself and his vision was so strong
that he stuck with it, in spite of all the evidence around him that pointed to
“big fat loser,” and became one of the must successful entrepreneurs of all
time.
Temporary failure is all the rage. All the cool kids have done it:
• Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team for lack of
skill.
• Steven Spielberg, a high school dropout, was rejected from film school
three times.
• Thomas Edison, who was dubbed too stupid to learn anything by a
teacher, tried more than nine thousand experiments before successfully
creating the light bulb.
• Soichiro Honda, the founder of Honda Motor Company, was turned
down by Toyota for an engineering position so he started his own damn
company.
• Beethoven’s music teacher told him he was talentless, and more
specifically, was hopeless at composing. Beethoven turned a deaf ear. (I
know, so bad. Sorry.)
• Fred Smith wrote a paper while at Yale about his big idea for an
overnight delivery service. He got a C. He went on to create FedEx
anyway.
The only failure is quitting. Everything else is just
gathering information.
There’s no big mystery to this stuff: If you want something badly enough
and decide that you will get it, you will. You’ve done it before—you’ve lost
the weight, gotten the job, bought the house, quit the nasty habit, gotten in
shape, asked someone out, splurged on the front row tickets, grown out your
bangs—you just need to remember that you can do it with anything in your
life, even the things that you presently think are out of your reach.
There are plenty of people out there in the world living the kind of life you
only dream about living, many of whom are far less fabulous and talented than
you are. They key to their success is that they decided to go for it, they stopped
listening to their tired old excuses, changed their lousy habits, and got the fuck
on the fuck.
Here’s how you can, too:
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