Mix These Opposites To Achieve More
Start Creating Like The Universe
Warm meets cool to create the storms that give life to our planet. Male meets female to create the storms that give life to us. If the universe creates by blending opposite forces, why shouldn’t we?
So what are the ingredients for lasting success?
After much trial and error, I think I boiled it to just two … but they need each other to function properly.
The first ingredient for lasting success is drive.
Before anything can happen in our lives, we need drive.
Drive pushes us past our own distractions to go for it.
But drive does not determine the quality of our work, it only pushes us to work.
If we all we have is drive on our way to our goals, we might step on people’s toes, or disrupt other parts of our lives, or miss opportunities because we were moving too fast.
What’s even worse, if we achieve some of our goals through pure drive, we could end up getting arrogant because we think nobody else matters.
Our ego might even fool itself: We’re driven, so we can do anything amazingly!
That’s pride, not to be confused with self-confidence.
We know from both literature and experience that pride proceeds a fall. And pride often results when we get something through the drive of our ego.
In fact, arrogance is really a trap for those who might abuse their success. Arrogance weakens us as we over-estimate our abilities which detracts from the quality of our work.
To avoid the trap and play the long-game, drive must be combined with another ingredient…
What reigns in that pride?
We need something to temper our ambition, to prevent arrogance from undermining our achievements.
Through a lot of self-testing, I think I discovered the other ingredient: humility.
Humility places us low where the waters of life flow, where we understand others (by standing under them), where we gain wisdom through the clear vision of inner calm.
When drive takes us to a plateau of success, our humility will keep us steady in the moment so that we can climb even higher.
Drive will push us forward, yet it’s the humility that will leave happy people in our wake, allies for future projects!
In business deals, humility helps us remain quiet and listen when a deal is going down, instead of chattering the deal away.
Even in romance, nothing is more attractive than someone who is successful yet remains humble.
Living it.
So, while you’re sporting your humble smile, hearing more because you’re listening and seeing more because you’re watching, your path to success will come into vision.
That’s because humility also opens up intuition.
Now is the time to enact drive, to take the bold steps forward and make things happen, to fulfill your dreams.
Drive and humility play off each other in a circular fashion.
Drive takes the insights gained from humility and forms them into plans which turn into actions which become the fulfillment of our destiny. Humility leads us to the right path, drive leads us along the path to our own personal mountaintop.
And that’s where the opposites meet again, in realizing that staying “low” will take us “higher.”
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https://medium.com/soul-mission/whats-your-soul-mission-5cedc54bc7e7