Believe in yourself.

Whether you think you can or you think you can’t—you’re right.—Henry Ford

No one is going to doubt you more than you doubt yourself. As American industrialist and Automobile pioneer Henry Ford once quipped, “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t—you’re right.” The nature of aiming for great things beyond your reach is that people will doubt your ability to pull it through. It is not that you will be doubted; the question is when. The bigger your goal, the bigger the opposition and the doubt you will experience from others. You’ve got to believe in yourself and why you are doing what you want to achieve. Most of us suffer from possibility blindness, which is the tendency for people to project their fears towards someone who is aiming for more than they think is possible.

The athletes that got the greatest-of-all-time designations, like Jordan, Serena, Tiger, Lebron, Brady, etc., were all doubted at some point. Before they got the moniker GOAT, they all had to believe in their greatness, practice relentlessly in the dark and eventually get rewarded in the light for their dedication, perseverance and commitment. In May 2023, I ran four full marathons in four weeks. It was one of the most audacious goals I have ever executed. It was tough to pull through, and the noise from the naysayers made it even more challenging. But I never doubted my ability to follow through, even though the self-doubt almost got to me. I have concluded that it is going to be the same for any audacious goal I set for myself, such as running a sub-3-hour marathon or climbing Mt Kilimanjaro.

One would think that the Greatest Of All Time athletes don’t get doubted often because they have delivered numerous times. But that is not the case; doubters continue to doubt. Even after running nine full and two half marathons last year, when I tell most peeps of my desire to run a sub-3-hour marathon, I am usually told how hard it will be.

Meditations

Daily Calm with Tamara Levitt – Mandalas

Tibetian-Buddhism has a tradition of making beautiful mandalas out of beautifully coloured sand. A mandala is a geometric work of art created on a large, flat surface and composed of thousands of tiny deposits of coloured sand arranged into stunningly intricate patterns of concentric lines, curls and shapes. A mandala is meant to symbolize the complexity of the universe, and its creation is a meditation itself.
As soon as the artist constructs the mandala, they destroy it. The artist destroys the mandala to remind themselves of the lesson of impermanence; nothing lasts forever. Our instinct is to resist change; impermanence is an unavoidable law of nature. The more we resist change, the more difficult we make our lives.

It is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not. – Thich Nhat Hanh

Daily Jay with Jay Shetty – Wandering Mind

According to a research study conducted by Harvard psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth (and Daniel T. Gilbert, they used a special “track your happiness” iPhone app to gather research. The results: We spend at least half our time thinking about something other than our immediate surroundings, and most of this daydreaming doesn’t make us happy.

The researchers estimated that only 4.6 percent of a person’s happiness in a given moment was attributable to the specific activity he or she was doing, whereas a person’s mind-wandering status accounted for about 10.8 percent of his or her happiness.

A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy one. We would be much happier if we could focus on what is in front of us. Cultivating awareness requires presence, effort and intention.

Daily Trip with Jeff Warren

Podcast