The Push

The gist: You have an important decision to make.

Sometimes you set a goal and it doesn’t feel like you’re going to make it.

Sometimes you tell people about it, and you start to feel like a failure before you even make it to the deadline.

Sometimes you just don’t know what to do. Do you keep going or do you give up? Do you preemptively set a new deadline and start over again or do you push through and try to make it anyway?

If the answer were clear, you’d pick one and run with it, but it isn’t. It never is. There are a million ways to rationalize any choice you make, and the only way to choose correctly is to pick the one that feels right.

In this moment, you have a unique opportunity to either tell the truth or lie. It’s unique because, for the most part, nobody else cares. But you do. If you make the wrong choice, no one will criticize you. But you will. No one will hold it over your head. But you will. The only one who cares about the truth now is you.

In this moment, you choose the story that you will tell yourself. And the more often you choose it, the more you’ll tell it. The more you tell it, the more you’ll believe it. The more you believe it, the more real it becomes.

It’s within these moments that you—and only you—define who you really are.

You can put it off and explain why; they’ll understand. They really will—no one’s going to get upset about it. But what about you?

As Seth Godin would put it, you either choose to ship, or you choose to wait. The more you ship, the more you ship. The longer you wait, the longer you wait.

Both choices come with consequences, and if you choose to ship, then you also implicitly choose to push. The push is always hard. Sometimes it’s painful. And sometimes it doesn’t work.

But if it’s who you are, then the choice is obvious and the path is clear.

I choose to push. What do you choose?

~~~~~

Image by: jam343