April 17, 2015

By Dr. Roy Carriker

You are encouraged to watch a TED Talk by Brazilian entrepreneur Bel Pesce. While she addresses entrepreneurial dreams, her points are very appropriate to achieving any life goal. Pesce suggests that too many people use commonly held myths as excuses for accepting falling short of their dreams. Briefly, the five can be summarized as follows:

• Others’ success is overnight and lucky.
• Someone else has the answers for your success.
• Things are going reasonably well, so you can relax a bit.
• Not reaching your dream? It is someone else’s fault.
• Achieving your goal is all that matters, not the journey.

Why this matters:

Lofty dreams or goals are not easy to achieve, hence the journey to their attainment can be fraught with obstacles. Accordingly, it can be very tempting to make excuses, calling on one of these five myths as the problem. You need to own your path. Before accepting one of these convenient excuses, do a bit of self-examination as to how you may have contributed to falling short of your dream, and make certain that accepting one of the five myths is not the problem.