The Forums › Forums › Emotional Journey › Ups and Downs › Why is it easyer to think better of other then ones self! › Re: Why is it easyer to think better of other then ones self!
This really is an interesting subject—how do you stay motivated when progress is so hard to come by? And how do we define success? What are reasonable expectations? The answer is: there is no one right answer.
Of course, these are not questions that are limited to ADDers. Everybody has talents and “difficulties.” And everybody has to find a path that capitalizes on the former and mitigates the latter. It seems to me that right off the bat you have to jettison the weight of other people’s expectations. Nobody should have to make excuses to anybody else for what they are or what they want to achieve in life. As for your own expectations, I’d replace the concept of “expectations” with “possibilities.” Shoot for the limits of those possibilities—and then some. Maybe you’ll get there. Maybe you won’t. At least you’ll have taken a shot. Besides, we have no sense of what we should expect until we actually embark on the adventure. Even then, life is full of surprises right up until the end. For thousands of years, sages have told us it’s the journey that’s important, not the destination. Once I bumped in to a professor of mine in a bookstore. I had nothing in my hands. When I told him I couldn’t find the book I was looking for, he said, “Don’t be discouraged by what you didn’t find, embrace what you DID find.” Or something like that. Looking back, I think he was right. So much for expectations.
Maybe TooFat will weigh in here. This is right down his alley.
PS: As an aside, there was an interesting article in Inc. Magazine a decade or so ago. It was about research done by a Columbia Business School professor named Amar Bhidé. Bhidé surveyed the founders of the Inc. 500 (a list of America’s fastest-growing privately held companies) and discovered something interesting: he found that 41% of the founders had no business plan at all, 26% had a rudimentary plan, and only 28% had a formal business plan. WHOA! When asked about it, Bhidé said:
“There are several factors [in play]. Many, if not most, successful businesses get started in fields that are characterized by high turbulence or change, change that is not being generated by the entrepreneur. It’s exogenous change. And in those kinds of fields, first off, there’s very little information available with which to write a business plan. Take the classic case of Bill Gates and Paul Allen starting Microsoft in 1975. If they had tried to do a competitive analysis or a customer analysis, they wouldn’t have known who their competitors were or been able to do the classic comparison of strengths and weaknesses vis-à -vis their competition. And they wouldn’t have known who their customers were. When things are changing rapidly, there isn’t data.”
These companies sound a lot like an ADDer’s life: a lot of turbulence, not much data. The point is, you can spend so much time trying to reach some arbitrary goal (expectation), you can miss an unexpected opportunity.
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