“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it you will land among the stars.” – Les Brown

The end of the year is near. Many of you have New Years resolutions that you like to do this time of year. “2009 is the year I [insert goal here]” and so on. While I’m sure you’d like to believe that next year is the year, it probably won’t be if you give up. Us humans are terrible at estimating what we can accomplish. We tend to overestimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what we can do in the long term. When we realize we can’t accomplish what we wanted in the short term (overestimation) we give up and it ruins our chances at the long term. Many people spend time in Dip, and never follow through. Seth Godin talks about this a lot. Malcolm Gladwell has a new book about this called Outliers: The Story of Success that I am very interested in reading, where he talks about how life circumstance, a little bit of luck, and straight up hard work is what makes you successful. Gladwell writes some really throught provoking stuff, so I’m interested to see what he brings with his latest.

For those of you who do the resolution thing, aim huge. Go BIG or go home. If weight loss is your thing, don’t try and lose a few pounds, try to turn into a calvin klein underwear model. When you aim big, you are going for your FULL POTENTIAL. None of this pussyfooting bs. Go for it, all the way or don’t bother trying cause you will quit when you don’t see immediate results in the short term. When I started rockclimbing last year, I saw these guys climbing walls that seemed impossible. I was so impressed with it. My climbing partner and I both agreed that that’s how we were going to be, if not better, despite not having the body type for it (the best climbers are usually tall and lanky). Since then, we haven’t quite gotten there but we have gotten pretty darn good. Balls out, that’s how we go. Am I dissapointed that I haven’t gotten as good as I aimed for? Heck no, the process has been FUN, and I’m still lightyears better then I was when I first started. All it took was a belief that I could reach for something that seemed unattainable, and then start moving. Be the absolute best you can be, because settling for anything less is disrepectful to yourself. Stop making up excuses. Don’t wait till Jan 1, start now.

“God doesn’t require us to succeed; he only requires that you try.” – Mother Teresa