Don’t wait for extraordinary opportunities. Seize common occasions and make them great. Weak men wait for opportunities; strong men make them.
~ Orison Swett Marden
Your efforts to change, are they usually whilst you are at the bottom looking up at the top of the mountain. A lot of persons are going to be at the bottom of the mountain when they want to change or take action. However, the way in which we approach the task in this moment is life-defining.
At the bottom of the mountain, persons usually tend to feel bad or even berate themselves for not having pursued those important goals; this is what crushes their feelings of confidence and self-worth. Thus, at this severely weakened point, these persons would try to make a dramatic turn with the music from Braveheart playing silently in the background. Nobody could blame them for wanting to stir a turn around on the ship, but they can not use weakness as a foundation for growth -- that really doesn’t work out well. Trying to complete a feat of strength whilst standing from a position of weakness is synonymous with like trying to light up a fire in a pool or watering a garden plant with hot lava. It’s just like hitting yourself in the head several times and continuously saying, “you are weak, you are weak,” after failing to lift about 200 lbs, rather than lifting a lighter weight to build your strength. I could come up with some more similes once requested.
Rather unfortunately, it is possible for us to make progress even after we have been beaten ourselves down all the while. It is unfortunate due to the fact that it is one of the many “sometimes solutions” which trick us. We tend to erroneously think thay if something could works once, it would always work. So it is really not that you can not ever do stuffs with performance-driven strategies, rather, it is the cost of doing work in this particular state of mind which hurts us. Even if we happen to have temporary success from self-abuse, it would decreases our willpower in the long run, de-motivates us, and thus trains us to dislike (hate) the work in the long-term. It as well might even scrape us by in the present, but it could harm our future.