How many things in life appear to be one thing….but are really not?
When you were young you may have had a fear of the dark.
As you grew older you came to understand that there was nothing different from what you saw in the daytime…
but for the absence of light.
Most track and field aficionados in the early Fifties felt that the human body could not allow an athlete to run a mile in under four minutes.
Until 1972, women were not allowed to compete in the Marathon at any Olympic Meet. Officials thought the long exhausting event was too strenuous for the female body.
After being introduced by
David Thompson, in his Hall of Fame induction speech, Michael Jordan made a comment, in what was mostly an edgy and competitive speech….
“Never say never…limits, like fears, are often just an illusion”.
As soon as he said that I had to write it down.
Like many Scriptural verses, which I have read,
like several of Tolkien’s words that he had Gandalf speak, like about half of what William Buckley has written, and like so many C.S.Lewis phrases my eyes have scanned.
I knew Michael’s was a comment I had to transcribe and commit to memory.
“Limits, like fears, are often just an illusion.”
Read that again and consider it for a moment.
I do not believe Michael was attempting to channel
Tony Robbins…
but, that is a incredibly motivating sentence.
Before the committed effort by the United States government to land a man on the moon, space travel was a science fiction fantasy.
When I was a boy….
a comic book character named Dick Tracy had a phone on his wrist.
Multiple times in the development of the three i-products he brought to the public, Steve Jobs had to drive his Apple team to the edge because they would tell him they could not get something done or complete it by his deadline.
So many “limits” are self-imposed.
Steve Jobs drove them to distraction, but his drive made them push through their “limitations”, and now the world is different because of the very device I am writing on, and you are reading on at this moment.
A great many limits, and done fears are imposed on us by parents, friends…who are attempting to be thoughtful and considerate because they want to protect us from failure.
In 1985,
when I told my Mother I was leaving the teaching profession to enter the financial business….and mentioned the monetary possibilities… she said,
“you don’t want to do that !”
She thought, at the time,
making more money might make me different.
She was fearful it would lead me toward negative consequences.
It presented me so many positive opportunities …
and she came to see that.
Those same parents put you on a bicycle, maybe with training wheels first….then they removed them…and pushed us down the sidewalk as we wobbled and eventually gained our balance.
We broke through that limitation and maybe the fear of falling.
Push against that envelope.
So many barriers can be overcome by commitment, perseverance and time.
In the television series….
“The Men Who Built America”…
Vanderbilt, Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford dealt with extreme limitations and roadblocks and the fears of a slow moving society, to achieve great fame and fortune while constructing the infrastructure of what would become the greatest nation and economy in the history of the world.
Are you allowing yourself to be hemmed in by a self-imposed barrier, fear or limitation?
Did you give your best effort last year?
Many people have mental
“audio tapes” from the past that they hear over and over.
Those old “eight tracks” have played too long.
Erase and Replace those confining commentaries with a new vision of potential and possibilities.
Examine the fearful or limiting illusion in front of you and your progress……
and either remove it, see through it, or destroy it with your commitment and perseverance.
Limits are barriers meant to be broken through.
Fears are confinement’s to be overcome.
It’s how progress is achieved.
The dark is nothing but for the absence of Light.
Get a flashlight.
The mile is no longer has a four minute barrier.
Terry Bethea 