Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Are You Building the Right Traps?
Here's a favorite quote from Gil Bailie:

"No lions are ever caught in mousetraps. To catch lions you must think in terms of lions, not in terms of mice. Your mind is always creating traps of one kind or another, and what you catch depends on the thinking you do. It is your thinking that attracts to you what you receive."

It's easy to think too small. Oh, sure, we all have big dreams of what we WISH we could accomplish. But we find those dreams challenging and never get around to WORKING for them.

What work we do toward them is usually on a pretty small scale. We may set out to build financial security for ourselves, but we content ourselves working toward something that, at best, will bring us a little extra side income.

It's easier to build a mousetrap than a lion trap. It takes more time, more effort, more materials to catch lions.

If we never venture beyond the easy little things on which we focus our time, though, we never accomplish the big ones.

That's where I find myself right now. I've been in Internet marketing for over seven years now. I've made enough to pay the bills regularly -- until the recession hit and I experienced some major bumps in revenues.

I was satisfied with getting by. Now, simply getting by was never the big dream I started my business to accomplish. That dream was much broader, much wider, much grander.

Along the way, though, I became willing to settle for trapping mice instead of lions. I'm back to where I was before the recession. I'm getting by well enough.

But I'm a bit shaken by how vulnerable "just getting by" can make me. The dreams of something grander are still there, and perhaps more tangible than ever. I'm far better equipped to reach those dreams now than I was when I first started.

I'm going to have to focus, though, on building bigger than I have in the past. As I consider how to build beyond my present position, I see many things I'll have to do that I have never done before.

In many ways, I'll need to abandon the familiarity of my present business and build it in new and different directions. It seems like every direction I turn, I find something new and unfamiliar facing me, challenging me to master it.

That's all part of what Bailie is saying, though. The bigger and more dangerous the dreams you're trying to catch, the more effort it will take to pursue them.

Where are you right now in pursuing the big dreams that started you on your present journey? Are you still pursuing the lions? Or have you settled for simply catching mice?
Jeff

Labels: inspirational quotes