Telling Yourself No

Greatness comes to those who stop and wait.

This isn’t about indulging in dessert after a meal, or late night raids of the freezer for some midnight ice cream. Though it certainly could be; I have quite a bit of experience with those things.

Instead this about telling yourself “no” to doing - on occasion at least.

I often find myself filling my days full to the brim merely for the sake of business -

This isn’t too uncommon of an occurrence. In the world we live in, business is a badge of honor. The harder we work, the more admiration we expect.

But we lose something with our perpetual-motion lifestyles. When we are constantly focused on implementation, we often lose sight of our greater goals. We lose our drive to be creative, and we often lack the higher vision to connect our work back into the greater tapestry of our lives. We too busy with heads-down “doing” to look up and make sure we’re headed down the right track.

And so at times it’s best to just put it all away for a bit - close our laptop lids, hideaway all the pen and paper, and just relax. We can emerge from our perpetual stoops and look around at the world and see what actually is happening around us. We can let ourselves get carried away in the moment, and dare I say it, be inspired and motivated by the things around us that we either love or that we think could be better.

And even when that itch to do comes back, swat it away for just a little while longer. Let that drive to make something great build into a torrent, until you can no longer contain it. When you can no longer eat or sleep without thinking about what you want to do, that’s when you know you’re onto something great.

And that’s when you can get back to work.