Have you ever wondered how long it would take before you achieve your dreams? Just how much hard work, dedication and grinding will it take before I finally reach that pinnacle of success? Well today I might be able to help you out with that.
I'm going to get down to the nitty-gritty today, because today, I want to talk to you about keeping the faith. Keeping the faith alive. Why we have to continue to believe in our Lord above and our will to become what we want to become, in the end. I have a few stories I want to tell you, about keeping the faith.
First, nobody's going to believe in you and your dreams more than you are. So, if you lose faith in yourself then you'll eventually fail, because first off, anything that you don't believe in you won't take seriously, and you won't continue to drive for. If you believe in a perfect relationship, you'll continue to drive for that perfect relationship. If you believe in your eventual success in your work world, your work life career life, then you'll eventually get there. You just have to keep going, keep practicing. Never lose faith.
So, I have a friend I was talking to about a podcast I was listening to. It was about staying hungry and always striving for success and striving for perfection. He was talking to me about how he knows exactly how to do that. He's from a different country, and what he does is remember what it feels like to be hungry. You know what he does? He doesn't eat on Sundays. Kind of sounds extreme, but if it works for him, he's run multiple businesses, and he knows what it's like to go without eating.
So, you know, as Americans, we tend to take hunger for granted, and if something doesn't work out within a reasonable timeframe, we give up. We say, maybe it's not meant for us, forget it, I'm just not good at that, but one of my mentors recommended this book called Outliers and it's a book by a guy named Malcolm Gladwell. He's kind of a quirky character, he's from Canada. You know, I've learned a lot of great entrepreneurs come from Canada because there is something about their drive and their way to deliver things, it's awesome.
What the book talks about is the rule of 10,000 hours. If there’s anything you want to do, is what my mentor told me, you have to be ready for failure because it's going to take a lot of tries and it's going to take a really long time before you’re successful. So the book talks about this 10,000 hours rule. Anybody who does something, no matter if you’re naturally talented or not, if you do something for 10,000 hours you're going to be perfected at your craft.
What I did with that information is I took it, and I ran with it. I thought if I was to do daily live sessions, I don't like speaking in front of people, I don't like public speaking, but if I were to do daily live sessions, how would that make me perfect my craft? How good could I actually get? So, I did it, I launched it, I began it, but I also brought 10,000 hours of counseling experience with me as well. I've been doing this for a decade and a half working with kids, being trapped in a car with kids and talking to them about their failures, their strengths, their goals, ambitions, their fears, their passions, and I think I've gotten really good at it. Now people come to me and they say, I don't understand what it is about you, and how I can talk to you, when I can't talk to anybody you know me so well.
I probably have had over 10,000 hours of this, I've had experience, so when he talked about that in the book it made sense. He used a couple other examples. I think one of the biggest examples he used was the music composer Mozart. Mozart sucked in the beginning, he started out as a young kid with compositions he made, that nobody really listened to or wasn't really deemed the greatest at that time. You think about Michael Jordan. He got cut from his high school basketball team, but he kept striving, he kept putting in hours, and putting in the work. We need to just think of all the great people, so when you do something for 10,000 hours, you will be a master at your craft. The golfers, they call it the Masters. Nobody will ever make it into the Masters unless they've golfed 10,000 hours. That's just what the book talks about, science proves that it takes you. I’m going to say this over and over again, it takes you 10,000 hours to become great at something.
What we do as human beings, because I'm living in America, as Americans, we do something for maybe a couple months or a couple years and we get frustrated, we give up, say maybe this isn't going to work, maybe this isn't my passion, maybe this is something that just wasn't my calling. Think about it, you could use this in so many different ways. If you think about when we go to college, how long does it take you to become college certified? How long does it take and how many hours it takes for you to become an apprentice? You could become an apprentice, but you're not going to start making money and be considered a master or professional at what you do, until you reach a certain number of hours.
So, it makes so much sense, and a lot of people quit because they just don't want to put in that dedication, that work, and they don't have the faith. You have to keep the faith; you can't give up. Anything you want to do in life you have to practice, and that goes for dating as well. I tell my coaching clients, if you want to get good at dating and good at relationships, you have to practice. You can't just passively do it. There can’t be something that you pick up one day and say yeah, you know, I'm having the greatest relationship ever, no, it takes work and practice at everything. How long do you think it took for me to learn to make a perfect cup of coffee? I still can’t because I didn't start drinking coffee ‘till I got older in life.
Another example he talked about in the book were athletes; he used hockey players. He's from Canada so of course hockey is going to be one of the big examples given that it's a huge place for hockey. He talked about players who were born in the early months of the year, ended up being more skilled, more advanced, having more experience, than people who were born later in the year. The reason is, when they go into school, they're a little bit more advanced and have a little bit more edge over the people who got into school later. So, I think about just how a difference of six months of experience, practice, working in your passion, has over somebody who started six months behind you.
He used that for the hockey players, and he used it for people of Asian descent, being better in math then we are. We're really far behind when it comes to this. It’s a highly criticized and debated thing, but he did put in the book comparing Asian descent to Americans; you can't deny this has some merit to it. People wonder why we are so behind and it's because our system is set up so weird. It's really an easy system. I was talking to somebody the other day about how messed up our public school system is when it comes to keeping kids ahead of the curve, my kids. This is something that they talked about in politics and all that, but I'm going on a tangent here and I'm ranting, but the moral of the story is keep the faith alive.
Don't give up, keep fighting and keep striving. Whatever you want to do, think about this, think that you have to fail. Those YouTube comments I see, are those people that inbox me and say, you don't know what I’m talking about, and that's okay, I know I don't in this particular arena, but I'm going to keep going. It's not like I'm going to stop. I'm going to keep striving. What I do know is people, and I know how to connect with people. I do know relationships. How I deliver it, is just going to take practice. It's going to take more and more polishing.
So what is it that you’ve put in for 10,000 hours? What work have you put in that you have practiced for the last decade? If it's arguing, you'll probably be a really good debater. If it’s lying, you’ll probably be a master liar. What have you done? I want you to think about that, and when you think about that, think of what it is that you want to do? Great parents, or the parents who are spending countless hours taking their kids to practices, doing activities with them, engaging with them, they become master parents. What are you a master at? Think about that this weekend. I love you have a good weekend.