Shape Your Success

So many people speed past all kinds of opportunities that they can’t even see because a speeded-up person is always in the future, where nothing exists.

Trying to do too much too quickly leaves everything incomplete and you end up looking incompetent. And when it’s not complete, it kicks you where it counts. Speed is not the antidote to overwhelm, speed is how overwhelm gets created.

The great Thomas Merton said it this way, “To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It destroys his own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”