Goals have a learning curve, believe it or not. Think about it this way. At one point or another, everyone has had a bill to pay. There’s usually no way around paying what’s “due”. Goals and habits work the same way.
Key points
- Paying your dues means experience
- Practice = Experience
- There is no way around paying your dues
- There are no short cuts
- Passion allows motivation allows practice allows experience
- Feeling mental pain means you’re doing something right.
- Paying your dues means taking a lot of falls
- There is NO substitute for experience
The Most Important Lesson in the World
Paying your dues means gaining experience from practice. The human body is an amazing machine. If someone wants to learn a specific skill or achieve their goals, practice is key. If you want to be excellent at walking a tight rope, you have to really put time and effort into practicing it. Conviction is important. If it isn’t something you like doing, you’ll eventually lose motivation, which will effect your effort and that will impact your experience.
Yes, paying your dues means going through the pain of constant failure and a ton of trial & error. Sometimes people try to skip the pain period. They might walk a tight rope, get frustrated with their constant falls and failures, Then quit half way into it. The pain of discomfort and failure is what stops people from getting ahead. There is a lot of stress when progress is not measurable anymore. At this point, most people lose motivation and consider what they’re doing a lost cause.
The pain of not seeing any results is enough to do that. If someone is not able to beat 4 feet of rope walking and has been in that range for a month, they will lose motivation. That’s the difference between success and failure. Those who continue to push through the stall eventually find themselves slowly making progress again until they get another burst of experience. It isn’t just physical pain, it’s actually more mental pain. Habits and goals work the same way.
Meeting Goals
I cannot stress enough how important paying your dues is when it comes to achieving your goals. The pain period in itself is a skill to be learned. The more uncomfortable situations one is willing to put themselves in, the more experience they will get in learning how to gain experience. Getting ahead requires this knowledge. Some people can sense it, but don’t really understand it well enough. In my opinion, acquiring this habit is the most effective tool for success. Sometimes we can’t foresee our results. For example, there is NO WAY to know how something tastes unless we taste it ourselves.
Same goes with pain. We don’t know what a bee sting feels like until we get stung by a bee. We can guess and assume because other things have hurt us before, but the only way to really know is to have experienced it. There is no substitute for experience.
REMEMBER THIS: Your cue to keep pushing, your sign of progress is when you begin to feel frustrated and uncomfortable. That means you’re entering the pain stages of your development. This is where the real progress is going to be made and this is when you need to focus most. Most people quit when they get here.
After you complete the pain period, you have paid your dues. Be wary though. There may be more than one pain period. Stay on your toes!
For some great info that sheds light on achieving goals and growing yourself, I recommend 10 Articles That Changed my Life from Life Reboot.
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