The Sunday Reflection #19 - The reason we fail

 I was curious. What was I thinking about ten years ago today? Some people have a diary, I write a blog. I looked back to the 28th July 2014. The blog of the day was about how to be successful running your own business. I was intrigued. Would I write the same thing today? I had a read. One of the quirks of the way my brain works, is that as soon as I write a blog, I instantly forget it. I don't mean the detail. I store the facts, but I tend to 'fire and forget'. What struck me was that I'd probably write exactly the same thing today. There was one sentence which really caught my eye. 

The reason most of us don't succeed, I believe is down to the fact that we allow ourselves to be distracted by all of the things which don't matter, to the extent that we don't see the things that do.

I was writing this in the context of running a business, but with the distance of ten years, I realise that it is probably true across everything that is important to us. It is especially true in the context of relationships. It took me a very long time to recognise this simple fact. I don't mean this disrespectfully, but there is no one who annoys and irritates me as much as my wife. There are countless small things that she does that annoy me to distraction, However this is a very small part of our relationship and learning to not get annoyed at such things and to recognise that this is just part of the package is perhaps the most important thing in a relationship. What is far more important is to recognise the positives and to deal with the negatives. I am sure that she feels exactly the same about me and probably thinks I am the most annoying person on the planet. It is a difficult truth of relationships that the more time we spend together, the more we see things in our partners that irritate us. When we first meet, usually we are rather blinded by attraction. As the relationship develops, most of us try a little less hard to impress partners and we let slip the mask so they see our annoying traits. Relationships fail when we decide the irritating, unreasonable and unpleasant things start to outweigh the positives. Sometimes we persist, even though the negatives outweigh the positives. But this is another manifestation of not seeing the things that matter. In abusive relationships, people persist because the glaringly obvious downside is weighed less heavily than other aspects (which sometimes include threats). When people finally escape such situations, they will often ask why they didn't do it earlier. Sometimes it is because we think people will change, when we know they won't. Sometimes it is fear of the unknown. Of course staying in abusive relationships is an extreme case, but often we persist with doing small things that hold us back, which over the course of a lifetime hold us back and leave us with regrets. It often takes us far too long to do things that help as get where we want to go. It may be staying in a job long after you should have moved on, belonging to a political party or other organisation long after you realised that your values no longer matched theirs, or something silly and trivial such as following a musician or artists long after they stopped doing work you like. 

When I reread my blog of ten years ago, I realised that of late I've fallen into the trap I decried in my blog. Ever since I started my business, I have always regularly reviewed the way we do things. We've always had a plan for the next six months, two years and five years. We decide where we want to be in five years, then we work out what we need to be in two years and then we look at where we are in six months. We then work out a plan to get us to each of these objectives. I realised that we stopped when covid hit. We've been in survivial mode and we've not moved on at all. When you have no plan you go nowhere. In business as in life, when you don't go forward, you fall back. The last few years have been difficult for me. A pandemic and cancer have derailed my plans. I've lost focus of where I want to be, in business and in life. This hasn't all been bad, musically I've been prolific but without any real plan, it's all just been fun. I'm 62, I've hopefully got ten or fifteen years where I can do stuff, before the sands of time overwhelm me. If I am to enjoy it (and that should be something we all aspire to with our lives), I need to get the ducks in a line. One of the best things about writing this series of blogs is I sometimes realise the glaringly obvious. Today was one such occasion. This slot replaced "The tweets of the week". When I started the Tweets of the week, it was brilliant, but it became a chore and I realised that Twitter had morphed into X and the less time I spent on it, the happier I was, so I didn't want to promote such a place. Last November I made the decision to change tack on a Sunday. Whilst the Tweets of the Week was a really popular feature and brought a lot of views to the the blog, I am far happier with this series. It may surprise you to know that I never wrote a blog to garner popularity and at times the popularity of the blog has mystified me, but I am grateful that people seem to still enjoy it. 

The truth is that if you want to succeed, the first thing to do is make sure that you do what is right for yourself. To do this it is necessary to have a clear idea of what really matters. Once you can do this, everything else becomes a lot easier. And never forget to appreciate the good things!

Arrendene in the sun. Beautiful. A reminder that we are lucky to live in Mill Hill pic.twitter.com/29LfZaKKjA

— Roger Tichborne/Rog T (@Barneteye) July 28, 2024

I'll finish with a little bit of music. I enjoy making music, I hope you enjoy listening to it. If you've not listened to The False Dots before, check it out. A little song about nostalgia.