PARENTS: Mindset & Performance

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The Bastard Child Called SUCCESS

Success is a bastard.

It’s the illegitimate child of a Mindset and Performance, always hoping that its parents get married.
Its greatest enemy is a Deadline. Its greatest fear… Failure.

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Everyone wants success, but its greatness depends upon how much we are willing to struggle for it. Some learn over time that small successes are enough for them to be happy, while others will accept nothing less than becoming a ‘remembered’ component of history.

Success is not good or bad. It simply is what it is.
It just another illegitimate child within YOU hoping its parents will get married.

The mother of success is Performance. She is made up of Motivation (Ability, Effort, and Environment).

Ability
If one wants to accomplish a task, the first thing they need is the Ability to perform what is needed. If an ability is natural, aka. God-given… we tend to call that Talent or a Gift. If it is not, then one will need to train, we call that, ‘learning a Skill’. Either way, both Talents and Skills need Effort in order to grow.

Effort
Effort is nothing more than doing whatever it takes to accomplish a task… PERIOD! Effort creates movement, while movement creates displacement… Displacement from stagnation and displacement from where you are. Effort helps to move one into an Environment in which a chosen task can be accomplished.

If an artist wants to create, Effort will make that person get paper and a pen. If a musician wants to record an album, Effort will push that person into a studio.

Environment
The Environment is equally as important as both Ability and Effort. It provides the tools and resources for one to function as well as the surrounding to nurture the task desired.
A poster of a hero reminds one to be a hero. A populated art table makes it easy for an artist to create. A team of great minds discuss great things. A group of criminals tend to want to perform cimes.

All of these combined, Ability, Effort, & Environment, create Motivation and motivation dictates Performance. Performance is critical to giving birth to Success.

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The father to Success is Mindset.

Mindset is all about getting your 'head straight'. It is made up of Focus, Discipline, Will, Courage, and Fearlessness.

While some components are obvious:

Focus – Stay on task!
Discipline – Knowing what needs to be done and following through
Will – The mental trigger to Effort

Courage & Fearlessness are a pair of twins that are distinctively different.

Courage requires Fear, Awareness, and Action in the face of Risk.
Fearlessness lacks fear in the face of Risk.

Being afraid makes one hyper-sensitive to Risk.

For the Courageous hyper-sensitivity is natural - as for the Fearless it must be trained.

When one does something risky the first time, they are usually scared and/or anxious (learning how to skate, driving a car, sky-diving) and hyper-sensitive to the risk.
Once they do it a hundred times, the fear is gone, but the risk remains the same. For some actions, such as skating, the risks are lower, while others, such as sky-diving, the risks remain extreme… and so, continual training is critical to replace the loss of hyper-sensitivity and anxiety.

The military wants Fearlessness as a common virtue and Courage as an uncommon virtue.

Fear is combatted with Knowledge, Wisdom, and training; for these are the foundation to Confidence.
As Fear is negotiated and decreased, Fearlessness rises in strength and confidence is born.

Note – NO ONE is absolutely Fearless.

This is why a Deadline is so powerful. A Deadline is the end time given for an objective to be obtained. Deadlines are the greatest enemy a Mindset fights. One deadline missed can easily grow into a group of enemy nipping at the very essence of a strong Mindset…

And when Mindset is wounded by this enemy, it argues, fight, and distances itself from Performance.

Deadlines are the foes that must be defeated before Success can be born. Mindset and Performance must be married before Success can be nurtured and raised.

But then again… This marriage is not for everyone.

For some, Deadlines represent an enemy too strong to fight, and so they procrastinate – as the enemy grows in strength. They become fearful of Failure, and so their strategy in life is to find a way to minimize and hopefully go on without Deadlines.

It does not work.

The fear of failure is paralyzing. It steals your breath, time, and life away. It makes the blink of your eyes, five years passing. It makes a silent ‘sigh’, a dead-end job. It makes a light cough, your failing health.

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‘In life, people are remembered by their Accomplishments or their failures to have any.’

Success is not mysterious. It is as old as Failure and intimately chained to it as one of the natural balances in the universe. While Failure is promised, as much as sins and death, Success is not.

Success must be earned; it must be given birth and nurtured.

This is why Success has value; this is also why each person’s amount of success is directly associated with their value.

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Success is not good or bad. It simply is what it is.

It just another illegitimate child within YOU hoping its parents will get married.

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-Omen, "Heroes aren't made during good times." - The Elite Forces Division

Wow...deep. The parts about fear really spoke to me, particularly because I'm putting down my weapons. Scared of getting beat up without them. But without them, I'm more within the law, and I don't look like the bad guy. ...I guess a small part of me is still a little conflicted as to whether or not I'm doing the right thing in deciding to risk taking on three opponent with nothing but my wits and martial arts training. Especially if they're overwhelming larger than me by hundreds of pounds. My Mindset and Performance are still in the making-up stage. I'm relocating in the near future to a mentor of sorts for more extensive work on my mindset in particular, which will simultaneously enhance my performance as well. As of now it's strictly a training and preparation partnership; neither of us thinks I'm ready. I don't know if I ever will be. There comes a point where you just have to suck it up and just do it and risk the chance of failure. ....Failure's terrifying. 


--204

I wrote this for one of our upcoming books. It was meant for Professional challenges, Social struggles, and Personal change.

Strong words Omen it's very well written

Thank you.

Your post reminds me of Aristotle's style of philosophical writing. While I prefer Plato, one could certainly do worse than to resemble any one of the masters.

Are Courage and Fearlessness operating in a zero sum situation? That is to say--as Fearlessness grows stronger, does Courage necessarily grow weaker? Are we most Courageous the first time we face our fears, when we are most afraid?

If Courage has three components called Fear, Awareness, and Action, all in the face of Risk, as the Fear component decreases, the value of Courage must also decrease, all other factors remaining equal. In order to remain exceptionally Courageous, Awareness and Action must increase enough to make up for the loss in fear. Fearlessness in this light is in fact a "dead weight" category, simply the space in us that is not Courage.

Wow. That pretty deep, Blue. While both Courage and Fearlessness are related, they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Both Courage and Fearlessness work in the face of Risk, what divides them is how they deal with Fear.

Fear is not absolute. It can be on a level such as nervousness and anxiety then hop over to the extremes of horror and terror. Fear is born through discovery. We normally get butterflies with first experiences such as kissing or talking in front of the class. We tend to throw all of those discomforting weird feelings into our box of Fear…

That is, until Courage steps up and pulls them out box. Over time, we enjoy that kiss and find methods to deal with those butterflies in order to get through our speech, but it took Courage to get there.

Some things are not so easy to digest. When Fear is tainted with disgust it becomes Horror; when pushed to the piercing extreme, it becomes Terror. Having a round fired at you with the intent to kill you produces a terror unlike any other. Viewing a mangled body next to you from violence generates horror that paralyzes everything within you.

If you have never experienced these things then Fear is that natural force holding you from your very next breath, thought, and step. Courage will help you to move forward in the face of this, but it is not easy.

Once you’ve seen it over-and-over, the horror decreases, terror produces actions from experience, and Fear is reduced. It never goes away, but it declines enough to allow actions to be taken quicker; hence, ones such as this tend to become veterans of the fray... others around these individual’s whisper words like, ‘Crazy’ or ‘Fearless’ (many of us loved and feared those guys).

As for the ‘Value’ of Courage decreasing with the growth of Fearlessness, that’s a great dang thought to question, I haven’t considered.

If a character screamed at the top of their lungs EVERTIME they saw a dead person in a horror movie before they took action, I guess it would lose value after a while with the viewer. It would almost seem unrealistic.

I don’t know, Blue. I think that is something to dig into.

Indeed....I haven't given it much thought until Omen mentioned the effect of seeing a mangled body next to you. At first I didn't think much of it because between emergency response and Utah, I've seen a lot of messed up stuff. Then tried to remember how I felt the first time I saw something like that, and he's right; it paralyzes you. You're not really feeling fear or terror in the moment; seems like things slow down, or like time is standing still, and you just feel numb like your in a mild state of shock. Remembering future times similar things happened though, we'd just bounce back up like it was just another friday. ....I think seeing that stuff is probably the leading cause of death for Empathy. You become more of a machine than a man.

Psychologists call it the principle of acclimation. If you're exposed to a stimulus long enough, you get used to it. That exposure still comes with changes to your body and mind, which persist after the stimulus is taken away, in case it comes back in the future. That's a major foundation of P.T.S.D., and Stockroom syndrome