Tripping the Circuit Breaker

Tripping the Circuit Breaker

We each have the ability, deep within, to achieve phenomenal success in life. But many people will never achieve their greatest, loftiest goals because they keep tripping the circuit breaker in their minds and shutting down the intense desire to achieve those goals.

There have been many inventors who failed to succeed in completing a successful working invention when they were so close. They yielded to another inventor who was clearly behind in experiments and working prototypes, but the lead inventor tripped that negative circuit breaker in his subconscious, the one that convinces us that we can succeed, the one that drives us to work on, though we are faced with failure after failure.

The circuit breaker in our minds works just like the circuit breaker in your home—it shuts down when there is an overload of power. And tripping it is much like throwing in the towel in a prize fight.

We’ve all succeeded at small goals in life, mostly taken for granted as insignificant. But I stress that our intense desire to succeed carried us to the finish line of those goals. In each successful accomplishment the circuit breaker in our subconscious mind does not get tripped into the “off” position. But we also have most likely had larger and smaller goals where we have tripped that circuit breaker, which in turn stopped our momentum and drive toward that worthwhile goal. So we know the mechanics behind failure.

We know, too, the mechanics that will lead to success.

My tripping of that circuit breaker after just a few weeks of trying to learn the new guitar I had purchased. I clearly flipped that circuit breaker into the “off” position, convincing myself that I would start up again in the future and learn the guitar then. Failure? Yes. Will I one day succeed? Maybe. I would have to start over.

But an intense, burning desire, in order to get you to the finish line, must be maintained from early on in the thinking and planning stages, and on through all the obstacles and small failures you may encounter along the long road to the achievement of that important goal.

Look once more at the New York City marathon runner. Take, for example, the person who never ran before and got the idea, maybe a year and a half before the more than 26-mile race, to do so. As with any worthwhile goal, the marathon runner would have to plan for success. Planning would involve diet, training, commitment to run, and allocation of time each day or week to work out. The road to that achievement would be very long. There might be injuries, a lot of pain, and setbacks. There might be perhaps hundreds of moments of self doubt, of frustration, of agony—plenty of times when that circuit breaker in the runner’s subconscious mind could be tripped into the “off” position.

I would venture to estimate that for every one hundred people with the goal of becoming a new marathon racer and training for one and a half years, only a percentage of the people with that first inclination to run would see it through to the end. Though there would surely be some circumstances beyond the runners’ control, many non-finishers merely flipped the circuit breaker.

If someone offered you $1 million to train for and run in that 26.2- mile marathon one-and-a-half years from now, do you think you could complete the race? Absolutely! So could I, bad knee and all; I’d manage somehow to walk, crawl, or skip across that finish line!

And here is an important point: The never-ending, intense desire to achieve that specific million-dollar goal would never cease to propel you forward for the full year-and-a-half it took. Amazing, isn’t it? Motivation works in strange ways.

C- 2012 J. Carinci from the book An All-Consuming Desire to Succeed