"True failures are divided into two classes . . .those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought."

– Adapted from John Charles Salak

I ran across this quote the other day, and thought it might be a great fit for our weekly connection due to the way its author frames the process of thinking and doing, or more to the point, not thinking and/or not doing. First, I think it's important to note that the overall problem is identified as what creates a "failure," and in my adaptation I have added the word "true" (true failure) to distinguish the experience from a simple mistake or just a bad decision. This is an important distinction because I'm sure that we all have found ourselves making mistakes that fall into these two categories, and if our goal is a more successful, meaningful life, we must be able to see these as good information versus labeling ourselves a "failure."

To the author's credit, he does use the word "never" in describing both of these problematic ways of being, and thus, if we take that word literally, we can see how this pervasive lack of thought and/or action would most certainly result in a life of failure.

This being said, I am generally not one who recommends using a problem or fear of a problem (i.e. fear of becoming a failure) as a motivation to succeed, especially when this fear seems to revolve around the question that I believe to be source of much of our misery, i.e., "What is wrong with me?" which in this case would translate to, "Why am I such a failure at . . .?" My rationale behind this rejection of fear as a motivator, of course, is that this fear (as with any fear) will throw our thinking into the lower part of our brain, and limit us in terms of how to address the problem. Therefore, given that I espouse a "Top of the Mind" perspective on all aspects of life, I suggest that we look deeper (or higher) into the wisdom of this quote, and see what it has to say about success.

For example, have you ever seen someone fail to accomplish a task because they did not put enough thought into the process before they acted? Or, to be more specific, we might ask ourselves if we have ever found ourselves in this position in the past, and whether we think we might again find ourselves in this position in the future? Of course, the answer is "of course!" However, when we look at this past behavior and future eventuality from a "Top of the Mind" perspective we don't have to fear that this means something bad about us, but instead see it as "good information!"...a raised awareness that allows us to make a more purposeful choice either before we go into an event, or even during some endeavor if we realize that we have not really "thought this through," so to speak.

Similarly, if we recognize that we may have had good ideas in the past but not acted upon them, or find ourselves having an inspired thought in the moment but not doing anything about it, we can once again use this awareness as an excellent opportunity to choose what to do next from a higher part of our brain (The Top of our Mind) as well as a higher sense of purpose.

The three main components to this philosophy are purposeful awareness, choice, and behavior. . . in that order! We must first have the awareness that we either have a good idea that deserves acting upon, or that we find ourselves in a situation that deserves more thought. Then, there is the choice to either act or think which is followed by the appropriate behavior.

The behavior (either doing something or giving the situation more thought) is where it all comes together, and as such plays a major role in determining our success, because if we have the awareness and know what to do (meaning, we have made the choice) but do not act, then what we are really saying is that acting on the awareness isn't really that important, and thus we are likely to find ourselves creating our experience of life based upon old learned habits or ways of being that we learned sometime in our past. These habits require no awareness or thought because, hey,...they are habitual! The problem, of course, is that allowing these habits to dominate our lives will very likely once again result in our thinking but not doing, or doing but not thinking, and eventually lead to failure.

Therefore, if you have decided that this is not the way you want to live, or better yet, decided that you want to be a person who creates success by thinking before they act and acting on the good ideas that they have, then I suggest you begin to look for situations in which to practice these more purposeful ways of being. The good news is that life will always give us many opportunities to practice!

Take care and God bless, Dr. Bill