HIGH BAR or LOW BAR
Monday, April 4, 2022
What if, every morning, we read a framed mantra above our desk, saying:
I WILL LEAP OVER THE LOW BAR EVERY TIME
We could do that every day for the rest of our days – but where is the joy in meeting easy targets, leaping low bars with a single bound?
But what if we raised the bar, just a bit, every day?
I know this sounds like that notion of lifting a newborn calf every day (expecting somehow to get stronger in lock-step with the pace that calf grows heavier.)
The mind-picture is of stretching and strengthening ourselves day-over-day until we accomplish things we never dreamt were possible.
Yes, we all need to spend a lot of our life jumping over low bars.
But that’s a choice, not a limitation.
We can jump higher, we can stretch further, to the point of leaping tall buildings in a single bound.
For that, we’ll need to develop stronger knee joints in our hind legs like the deer and antelope, which can leap tall fences from a standing start – or we can make our determination stronger, dream bigger and stretch further using every ladder, cable and come-along we can muster from our tool kit.
As there has been much rehab in my practices lately, my point is this:
Why not me?
Why not any one of us?
How high or low is your bar?
Now, raise it, and clear it.
Raise it a little more the next day, now clear that.
No need to stop.
Keep raising it.
If we focus on doing better work on fewer/focused things, we’ll leap over higher bars. There is no target too remote, no idea too weird, or challenge too large for us.
If your goal is big and has been done before – we can do that. It might be challenging, but not impossible.
And, if it’s BHAG* big and worthy and has never been done before, why not you?
If your day is not challenging enough, whose fault is that?
*BHAG – big hairy audacious goal