I will take the forty-day challenge

Daily Keys to Success

These daily excerpts from Randy Kay's book Daily Keys to Success will show you how to grow your potential while expanding your personal success to lead a life of significance. You will benefit from 365 topics with ideas, tools, and tactics for living life fully.

Dave tried to start a consulting business, but quit after one year because he could not source enough clients to support him. He joined a men’s breakfast club, but soon tired of getting up early on a Saturday morning, so he quit going. He set a goal of running a marathon, but after straining to just reach the five-mile mark, he gave-up. This was the pattern of Dave’s life story, until one day when he decided to take an art class in Mendocino, California. He was mesmerized by his eighty-year-old teacher’s abstract paintings that fetched thousands of dollars.

One day, because of some house repair, Dave’s teacher asked her students to enter through the rear door. Dave saw lying against the walls of the back room at least fifteen landscape paintings so realistic looking you could almost walk into the scene. As the group assembled in the teacher’s studio, Dave inquired as to the artist for those paintings. “I painted them,” answered the teacher. “But they are so different than your abstract paintings,” he said. The teacher smiled and said, “For almost all of my life I painted those kinds of landscapes. I have at least two hundred that never sold, and the ones I did sell went for almost less than what they cost to make. Then when I turned seventy, I just gave up and starting painting whatever came to mind, and now you see the results.”

The lesson in this story (and the artist’s story is true) is that it may sometimes take a lifetime of rejection and faded dreams, but if we keep on trying and eventually develop the courage to just let go and do what we were born to do, success can happen.

Here’s the challenge to you: For the next forty days pick a goal or project that is important to you—it can even be something you’ve failed at in the past. Commit to acting on that goal each day for the next forty days. Don’t quit, no matter what happens. At the end of forty days, see if others will affirm the work that you have produced. That should give you the answer as to whether your goal or project has the legs to stand on its own. Remember that it can take only one breakthrough to turn a failure into a success. Try abandoning yourself to your talent and dream.

“Life’s real failure is when you do not realize how close you were to success when you gave up.” ~ The Universe