Making Progress: Building your house on stone and constantly correcting your course

Have you noticed that what most people are capable of is often quite extraordinary, but what people will actually accomplish is too often very little?

If you're on the path to success, I want to congratulate you as one of the few who do! Rarely do people decide to succeed, and even more rarely do people take action. I encourage you to celebrate coming this far.

So you can sustain your momentum, take a second look at the first of the three elements that must be part of your success: your Target.

In order to be successful, you must make certain your Target is a goal that meets not only your desires, but your needs as a human being. Your Target must be truly fulfilling. Otherwise you’ll just have one more “to do” keeping you busy, and honestly, who needs that?

After all, when we busy ourselves with things that are unfulfilling and do not meet our needs as human beings, we leave no room left for those things that would enrich our lives, give to the greater good, and bring us success at the deepest level.

Think of your life like your stomach. If you pig out on junk food, it doesn't matter if you suddenly decide to have a healthy meal. You haven't left any room for nutritious fare.

If you do want to start eating healthy, you'll have to wait until your body reverses the damage you've done and cleanses itself of all the junk you've ingested. The only way to speed up that process is to consciously cleanse your body of the junk. It doesn't take going through an aenema to know they're no fun.

But if you want to produce dramatically different results in your health or in any other part of your life, this sort of reversing the damage is a must. You can't simply start from the state you're in. If you've built a house on sand, it does no good to begin planning the new wing of the house until the house has been pulled apart and rebuilt on stone.

Granted, the metaphor is imperfect. You could just abandon the old house and build a new one at a new location. But as far as I know, this is the only body, and the only life, you get, so abandoning it is what I believe they call suicide.

Progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. That place may be better health, more wealth, greater grades in school, more love in your relationship, more contribution to your community. But if you've gotten off the road to where you want to be, no matter how clear you may become what and where your Target is, it's useless unless you do an about-face and get started on the right road. Much like in arithmetic, if you realize after all your work you're actually very far from the right answer, the sooner you start over the better.

"(If) we are on the wrong road, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on."
- C. S. Lewis

Plus, as you travel towards success, you must constantly check your compass and correct your course. Your life will be much like an airplane soaring through the sky.

As an airplane flies toward its destination, the pilot is constantly going off course. In the journey from New York City to Las Vegas, the airplane may end up going the wrong direction literally hundreds of times. But how many flights have you heard of that end up landing at the wrong destination? Very few. Why? Because the pilot is constantly, consistently correcting the airplane's course.

In the same way, you must regularly reevaluate your progress and whenever necessary, however hard it may be to admit it, however much you may have become attached to your current strategy, you must correct your course and get back on track.

There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake.
- C. S. Lewis