I Want It Now

In today’s digital, interconnected, always on, instant gratification society, we are all pushed to look for immediate results. We’re wired for short-term benefits.

We want it all and we want it now.

This can pose a significant problem when we’re striving to achieve something that’s more akin to a long-term goal. Becoming a successful home inspector is not something that is going to happen overnight. It’s the result of a series of many small steps; sometimes aggravating, sometimes painful, and often expensive. It’s the combination of these countless small steps that eventually gets us to our long term goals.

But I want it all and I want it now.

It’s difficult for most of us to overcome that instant gratification mindset. Thankfully, there is a way that we can circumvent our desire for immediate results, and keep moving down the path to success. By breaking each one of these steps into even smaller steps, we can convince ourselves that we’re getting those split-second results we crave.

A useful trick for getting around our aversion to investing a considerable amount of time to a long-term project is to break it into multiple short-term projects. So, it’s worth going through that online class, even though trying to get through that electrical section may be one of the hardest things ever!

We tell ourselves a story of how going through the rough patches will be worth it when we reach our ultimate goal. We tell ourselves stories about learning and training. We tell ourselves stories about classes and exams. We tell ourselves stories about learning new things and obtaining new skills. We tell ourselves stories about how we interact with, and react to, others in our lives.

If our stories are good and we successfully convince ourselves that we can handle each of these smaller, short-term projects, we’ll eventually string together a few wins and position ourselves to reach those goals we’ve set.

Time is going to pass. It always does and there’s nothing we can do about it. With a little luck and prayers, we’ll all get older. We can do it while we sit around and lament our lives, the things we’ve done and the things we should have done, or we can slowly put together a solid business (and life) and get older while owning something worth being proud of (and possibly selling it later at a nice profit!)

But make no mistake, devising a plan for success and following through on it are difficult things to do. That’s why only so many people taste success: it’s tough to do hard things. Those hurdles are there for a reason; they’re meant to stop us, and they do a great job. They make life tough, and no one wants to deal with the tough things in life. We’d rather just cruise along.

If we want to reach our goals, we’ve got to be clear on what they are, we’ve got to decide to go after them, and we’ve got to be ready for things to get difficult. Being able to push through when life gets hard is a skill that lots of people never learn, but if we’re ever going to reach our goals, we’ve got to have that skill.

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Thanks, Joe