“You can do anything when you set your mind to it,” was a saying that could be heard often in my house growing up. In fact, my parents said it so often that eventually I believed it. It was engrained in me, and I still believe it to this day. But that saying alone doesn’t help you achieve anything. It takes hours upon hours of endless hard work that can sometimes seem pointless. Sometimes it seems that the work you are doing may not be accomplishing anything at all, and therefore you become discouraged. That is why you have to look at things from a small perspective rather than getting caught up in the big picture.
When hard work isn’t immediately paying off, just imagine yourself as a stone cutter hammering away at a rock, maybe a hundred times without seeing as much as a crack to show for it. Yet at the hundred and first blow, the rock will split into two and you’ll know that it was not that single swing that did it, but all that had gone before. The stone cutter is a perfect example of how hard work may seem pointless at times. If that stone cutter had focused on the fact that there was not any change going on with the rock, the end result would never have happened. It’s all about trusting the process and putting your all into each step without getting consumed with the end result.
