One of my customers asked recently about how to “balance” getting lots of work done, and achieve goals, in a short period of time when it seems like everyone in his life is trying to hold him back and sabotage him like wolves at the door constantly.
Specifically, he wanted to know if I had any “tricks” for dealing with it.
My answer to him is to read Nehemiah chapter 4.
Sinner or saint, the lesson is valuable, practical, and applicable to this:
Nehemiah and his boys were trying to rebuild Jerusalem’s walls after the Babylonian captivity, and were getting a lot of a hostility from the yokels. Both bureaucratic hostility and outright violent hostility. And so to get work done while fending off waves of wolves surrounding them, they’d basically work with one hand and hold a sword or spear with another.
In other words, they were constantly working on the main goal.
(i.e. building)
But, they were ready to repel all invaders, at any time, if necessary.
(i.e., fighting)
So holding a hammer with one hand, and a sword with the other.
That’s how you got to grow anything, including a business.
The SECOND you make a goal you will start getting resistance.
It’s as reliable and immutable a “law” as the sun coming up each day.
That resistance can be bureaucratic, like receiving a bull shyte regulatory letter demanding money you don’t have and time to dig up records you long ago lost. It can be emotional, like a spouse who isn’t psychologically comfortable with success trying to sabotage you (which Gary Halbert talked about in his infamous Personal Ad, and is well worth reading). It could just be friends, families, and/or old habits peeking at you from around the corner, tempting you to do non-productive and/or even self-destructive things. The whole “put crabs in a bucket, and if one tries climbing out the others pull him back in” is just as prevalent amongst humans..
The more you want to make things happen the more resistance you’ll get.
It’s just how it goes so you might as well get used to it.
And, I would argue, get comfortable with it.
If any of this was as easy as the lambo goo-roo prancing around social media like an idiot says it is, then everyone’d be doing it.
So that’s that for today.
If you want more “inner game” stuff like this see my free mobile app.
There’s some 30-40 hours of content inside.
And you can access it here:
Ben Settle
