This week we had a conference with President. He talked about how we make our own limits by working toward limited goals. As our faith and willingness to work increase, we can put the 'dreamer' into the work, and therein lies the key to success. This impacted me profoundly, remembering my hopes and dreams from two years ago and how much reality ended up diminishing them. This week, I really saw how much expectation can change results, as I applied myself in a way I never have before. Let me illustrate with an analogy.
Meet Dan, the stick figure. Really, his emotional range is as wide as his mouth- big smile, big frown. He likes to play tic tac toe, and quickly got tired of hangman. He would like everyone to know that putting a triangle blouse on his legs does not make him a girl.
Dan has a summer house (triangle on a square) on the chalkboard...yet somehow it doesn't take him far enough away. Deep in the two-dimensional recesses of his heart, he has a dream...one day, he hopes to be three-dimensional. Cubes inspire him; his imagination soars when small pictures appear to be distant objects. Yet there had to be something more. Seeing a photo across the room, he got an idea.
He starts, tremulously, with a single extra line from his head down to his legs, bending out. No, that looks stupid. He's lopsided. He adjusts his body, then gives himself a nose, hair, ears, fingers. He adds lines to reflect depth, and draws mountains, rivers and trees. He views his work, and does it all over again. Then he does it again, and again, until people flock to see Dan's beautiful, back- and fore-ground, inspiring new home. He's replicated his three-dimensional dream, but it's only a replication. While everyone's busy trying to frame the work of art, he escapes and finds a pad of sticky notes. No, a flip book. He spins his emotions into animated motion, reaching into the fourth dimension and snatching at the very dreams of the humans he so admired, weaving them into his reality. We creatures of the third dimension begin to aspire to one day be on a two dimensional screen like him.
His is the world of words on paper, art in the finest museums, movies on which we rest our highest hopes. Did he enter the third dimension? He never did, and he never will. But as he reached...sideways (he can't reach forward, silly, he has no depth perception), just as his certainty heightened that he would never achieve his dream, so ceased his interest. For he saw that there was no end of things in his own world he could make, and create.
As we aim for crazy goals, and as we heighten our actions to be just as crazy, we begin to enjoy life far more and accomplish more than what we originally expected...even if we never quite reach the impossible. We grow content with our own capacities. And our capacity is our responsibility. Quintuple your goals sometimes...it's good for you.