When You Think You’re Not Going to Make It, but Then You Do!

I’m going to start off by saying that this is more of a reminder than a set of instructions; otherwise, I’d be preaching to the choir. I know you already know what I’m about to tell you because you’ve been there, you've been through it, and you know how to succeed. There’s no complicated formula for the road to success. This came to me recently while surfing the waters of Southern Africa. All too often I find the answers to life’s successes when I’m stepping out of the comfort zone while adventuring, but they go unshared. It’s time to change that. This lesson in particular is one that every surfer knows well.

Sitting in the lineup, you’ve just paddled through the breaking waves to get “outside.” You probably took about ten of them in the head in the process but you’re there, anxiously waiting to catch one. You’re hungry, practically starved. The last wave you caught was so long ago that you’re not sure if it’s an actual memory or just an illusion. Today’s swell forecast reports well, it’s getting a four out of five star rating on the forecasters website. The rating is not perfect but good. As with many of life’s wants and desires, if you wait too long, you end up feeling starved or almost forgetting what it was like the last time it was in your grips.

As you sit anxiously yet calmly on your board watching the horizon with the water bobbing up and down like a buoy underneath you, you notice the seas getting bigger. The horizon swells up like a beast laying dormant who’s been awoken. You know what’s coming, it’s a set of waves: game time. Conversations between surfers end abruptly mid-sentence. Someone whistles and yells, “SET!” You see it, it’s in your crosshairs, it’s your wave. You start paddling for the peak knowing that you need to be in the best position possible to take off clean. YES! This is the one. Seeing this, you dial in your trajectory and get ready to paddle and to kick your heart out. It’s here, now’s the time! GO GO GO!!! You dig to the depths deeper, stronger, harder. The wave starts to lift the back of the board now and you know it’s time to kick. While still digging deep beneath the board with your hands, you simultaneously kick those legs like you’ve never kicked before. You can feel it, that rush, that all too familiar surge of energy. Your Life Force awakens. The inner serpent comes alive. Three more of your hardest digs and the waves are now picking up your entire body and board. You push up with your hands sending the board down onto the wave with your chest toward the sky at the same time, and with the grace and power of Poseidon himself, you pop up onto your feet! Victory!!! The wave you’ve been dreaming of is now beneath your feet.

You’ve done it, you’ve got that thing, that life desire you’ve been dreaming of is now yours. Or at least this is how it appears in the moment…

Shit, it’s fading. Where’s its power going? You start to slow down noticing there’s a big mushy section of water down where you’re heading. Dammit. After all that effort, all that waiting, all that stoke. Your epic wave becomes a lost dream. Not one to give up too easily, you hold on, hanging in there hoping for something to change. Then as you’re about to turn off the back of the wave it appears in front of you: a small steep section of water. Just enough to gain some speed and make it back to the section of wave that’s still surfable. Again, pointing the nose of your board down the wave, accelerating, a couple of pumping turns gets you back into the power. BOOM! You’re back on it, back in the action. The power, the speed, the rush propelling you along yet again. You surf the wave for as long as possible feeling that power, the energy, not just in the wave itself but within yourself. There it is, that Life Force, your prana is rekindled.

Satisfied with this thing, this goal, this ambition you’ve dreamed of for all too long. Feeling accomplished, amazing, energized, and on top of the world you paddle back out. Gotta get another one!

All so often people find themselves getting so incredibly close to achieving or attaining the thing they’ve worked so hard for, the thing they’ve been starved of, struggled for, all to discover an impassable problem, an impossibility arisen. Yet instead of looking for the section of wave to get past in order to get back on track—the solution—they throw in the towel. Giving up seems to be the only option in a limited mindset. So they give up.

Sound familiar?

The moral we all know and we’ve all lived before is that you just don’t fucking stop trying. The common thread with the world’s most successful is that they never stopped trying, they never quit. Even when things seemed impossible, they persevered. They kept looking for that way through. After all, success is failure turned inside out. To quote John Greenleaf Wittier, "Stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit, it’s when things go wrong that you must not quit."