When You Don’t Think You’re Allowed to Win, You Find a Way to Lose

If I had a dollar for everyone I talk to that has a completed university degree… except for one or two credits of work… I’d have an extra four dollars this week.

What’s maddening to the outside observer is that the missing credit is often not even a hard course, it’s something like Finding The Library 101, or Embarrassed to Be White 203. You literally just have to show up with a pulse to get a B+ and then you have your degree.

Then the obvious question is “Why didn’t you finish?” “Why don’t you just go back and finish it now?”

Then they give the speech their White House Press Secretary Hamster has prepared for exactly those questions. You know, the one that spins a thick whitewash over everything, implying that circumstances beyond their immediate control has resulted in a sub-optimal outcome, only when considered from a stereotypical measurement of immediate success. That the entire exercise was in fact extremely valuable and will unquestionably provide an expanded viewpoint upon which to better engage in an upward career momentum and thus cannot be framed as a failure when the objectives have in fact been met. Which is not to preclude the possibility of revisiting the location of elevated instruction at some later chronological point in the narrative, but for now more important tasks must take precedence.

Yeah right.

Let me tell you what really happened.

You got that close to the end of the degree and then suddenly everything just turned into this Alice in Blunderland experience where suddenly all your mental ability turned into mush, you lost motivation, something distracting happened and you focused on that, then suddenly something was due and you just hit this wall of critical personal failure that you can neither explain or wish to dare to happen again. It’s like one of those Epic Fail videos where someone is winning a race by a country mile and then they trip and slam into the ground like a fat guy having a stroke.

Okay, fast forward to now…

You’ve worked your ass off to be successful. Hours of work every week. Money down, risk up.

Everything is in place for success.

Well…

More like 99% of success is in place.

You just have to do the billing.

Doesn’t take all that long really…

One second.

Dammit the moderately important thing just broke down and it’s really important you have to fix it. Right now.

Then your mom calls.

Dammit mom, why call now? I really have to do the billing.

Then the grass on the lawn looks really a bit long and it really should be mowed.

Then…

Then eventually you’ll end up somehow failing. I know how familiar this feels to you.

The core of the problem is that you’re experiencing a low energy state and lack feeling entitled to succeed, to win, or to simply have things go right. So you sabotage yourself to align your level of success, love and happiness to the same level of your current energy set. This is why you can’t have nice things.

Knowing that, you do two things…

(1) DON’T WORRY ABOUT WHY YOU HAVE THIS MENTAL BLOCKAGE. I really can’t emphasize that enough. You’re not going to have some great moment of understanding and insight and then suddenly have the clouds part on your life and all be suddenly wonderful. In fact, the more you try and think about it this way, the less progress you’ll make on fixing the problem.

(2) JUST GO COMPLETE THE TASK YOUR STRUGGLING TO COMPLETE. Seriously, just force yourself to sit down and grind out that last credit for the degree, just grind out the billing, just go and ask her out. That’s it. That’s all you have to do. Just go do it, no matter how task avoidant you feel.

Then as you complete the task and gain that extra bit of success, happiness and positive energy, it makes you feel more entitled to have achieved success. Having finished those major tasks you’ve left undone will change the way you feel about yourself. You’ll stand taller, feel stronger and most importantly be at peace with yourself.

So what’s your blockage to success? What’s your unfinished task?