So recently someone posted a meme on one of my social media pages. It read, “I need a part time job which pays $20,000/week.” The reactions to the post ranged from disbelief to laughter, with a few likes thrown in. I was surprised to see how little support the post received. Now, to be honest, I’m not sure how serious the poster was. Which brought me to another thought: Why is the idea of $20,000 for a part time job such a ridiculous concept? Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Was that $20,000 a week?” Sure, why not? Now that we’re in agreement that’s what I said, let’s talk about your next thought. “That’s impossible.” What makes it impossible? “Well it just is,” you say. First of all, that is not the answer to the question. I asked for a cause and you gave me a statement of being. A statement of being is not necessarily a cause.
Dictionary.com defines impossible as:
not possible; unable to be, exist, happen, etc.
unable to be done, performed, effected, etc.: an impossible assignment.
incapable of being true, as a rumor.
not to be done, endured, etc., with any degree of reason or propriety: an impossible situation.
utterly impracticable: an impossible plan.
hopelessly unsuitable, difficult, or objectionable.
So, let’s take them one at a time. 1) unable to exist. I can google the phrase “make $20,000/week” and there are lots of opportunities to make $20,000/week so it can exist. 2) unable to be done. We’ll come back to this one. 3) incapable of being true as in a rumor. Possibly, but I know of several people who actually do this. So, for me, it’s not a rumor. 4) not to be done with any degree of reason or propriety. This assumes it would be, in some way, unreasonable or improper to make $20,000/week. Well I guess if you’re selling contraband, then maybe…..5) utterly impractical. Hhmm….impractical. This implies that the act of earning $20,000/week part time simply wouldn’t fit in with your lifestyle. Well, I can’t answer that for you, but I think you would agree that to make $20,000/week part time means literally you only work 20 hours a week, that would not be impractical because you would have the other 20 hours a week to fit the rest of your life in. 6) hopelessly unsuitable, difficult, or objectionable. Let’s rule out anything immoral and illegal, shall we? That leaves us with difficult. Which leaves us difficult and unable to be done which are nearly the same. Often, we label things difficult and unable to be done from our own perspective; and typically, we label before we really know if it is actually difficult and unable to be done. So, when we really research it, we find that these to be completely subjective. They are difficult and unable to be done because we’ve never actually done it before and our low self-esteem says, we are not up to the task. So, really, it boils down to us telling ourselves we’re not up to the task.
What if that was a lie? What if we tell ourselves hundreds of little lies every day to keep us safe? What if we are keeping ourselves safe from failing or succeeding? Now if I’m touching a chord, here. You should be feeling a little uncomfortable. Often, we feel uncomfortable when we hit upon a truth. “Fear of failure is the No. 1 reason people don’t set goals or try new things,” said Mohsin Shafique, a former medical school student who is chief executive of Linkagoal, which was designed to help people set and achieve goals. * There don’t seem to be numbers on the percentage of people afraid of success, but there are tons of articles on how to overcome it. This leads me to think that there must be a great many people who suffer from this.
Fear in general causes us to self-sabotage. In other words, we come up with reasons why it can’t be done. Its impossible. Rather than assume it’s impossible try looking at how other people did it. Success comes when we courageously learn and courageously do. I define courage as doing what needs to be done despite the fear. Fear can be addressed, by the way. **
*https://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-scared-20151031-story.html
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