Do Your Best, Let Life Do The Rest

Have you ever gotten excited about a new project, gotten yourself to take a massive surge of activity towards it, only to find yourself feeling frustrated and burned out shortly thereafter? It is not uncommon for this type of thing to happen, and it can leave you feeling a little bit jaded after the initial novelty of starting a new project wears off.

It is during this period of time that most people quit, take a rest, and then start on yet another project they feel excited about. Imagine if you didn’t do that though. Imagine if you stuck with it, and carried through to the end this time. How would you feel about yourself if you did that?

So what’s the best strategy to follow here? Do we just keep working harder and harder until we achieve whatever goals we want? You may be surprised to hear me say – No.

The challenge with the “Keep plugging away until it’s done.” theory is that it assumes that you have absolute and completely personal control over the situation at hand, and that you can exercise control simply by taking more and more action. This, of course, is an illusion. Sometimes taking more action will not produce any more results. Sometimes the only thing that will produce results is the passage of time.

For example, you may very well have done everything perfectly right towards your goal or dream, but now it is time for life to take over and make things happen in due time. Sometimes there is nothing else you can “do” to speed things up any faster. You have to accept the fact that you may have to give up control for a little while and let life do the rest.

As I’ve been doing a lot lately, let me use Blogging as a simple way to illustrate my point. Let’s imagine that I’ve decided to build up this blog and I want to increase my traffic this month. So let’s say that I decide to commit to writing 1 article every single day this month as well as following a very specific promotional / marketing process on a daily basis. The specifics aren’t important, but let’s imagine that I am on day three out of thirty of this process and I haven’t yet reached my traffic goal. I’ve written my article for the day, I’ve promoted the blog according to my planned strategy, but I’m feeling frustrated because the results have not come yet. Does this sound familiar?

Sometimes we just have to be patient. Sometimes we have to do our best to do our part, and then we need to hand things over to “the Universe” or “life” or whatever you want to call it, and be patient as we wait for things to come back to us. Although we may choose to revise our goals and activity levels and perhaps decide to write two articles every single day instead of just one, there really wouldn’t be any point in writing 30 articles in one day or 60 articles in one day and publishing them in hopes that it will speed things up.

I once heard someone say “It takes 9 months to make a baby, no matter how many women you put on it.”

Although the analogy/metaphor doesn’t exactly fit what we’re talking about here, I think it does paint a picture. Sometimes there really IS nothing else we can do but wait. Sometimes taking any more action is NOT going to make things go any faster. Sometimes we just have to allow nature take its course.

I know it can be frustrating, but that’s just the way life is.

So, if you are in that place where you’re feeling frustrated and burned out because you can’t seem to figure out what else you can do to make things happen any faster, perhaps you’ve already done enough. Perhaps you’ve already done MORE than enough. Perhaps you just need to wait for things to propagate and come back to you.

Of course this is different from just sitting around and waiting for life to deliver everything to you without you lifting a finger. That’s not what I’m talking about here. What I’m talking about here is when you’ve already done your best, you’ve already kicked as much butt as you possibly can, but you just haven’t seen the results that you ultimately want yet. If that’s where you’re at, perhaps you just need to let go a little bit and let time take it’s course.

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