Today I would like to speak of the difference between fundamental perseverance, which is a required condition for success, and morbid fixation, which rather distances success and leads to failure and defeat.
We all experience this at some point, but not necessarily consciously.
Perseverance is the key to any form of achievement, as I’m sure you already know.
Consistency with a plan is as important as natural ability or good timing if you want to accomplish great things. On the other side, doggedness frequently crosses the line into obsessiveness.
And the space between being unhappy and being successful is the same as the space between being obsessed and being persistent.
In its many forms, success is the materialization of our highest aspirations and deepest yearnings. If we “won them over” when we were courting them, it meant that we were successful in our pursuit of their affection. If we are a nation that seeks freedom, then our battle for independence will be a victory if we are victorious.
When we strive for a certain position, if after patience we attain the position then this effort has been crowned with success, we achieved!
But consider what may transpire if we misread the other person’s emotional cues. What if the other person already has a heart, though? At what point do we learn to let go?
To avoid losing the fights that cost you the most emotionally, the ability to let go in the face of reality is crucial.
There is a distinct and fine border between national ideals and actual conditions.
In the modern day, it is feasible to tell the difference between a people’s genuine desire for autonomy and a pathological obsession with power.
Instead of helping the people achieve freedom, this only further divides them. It shines an eager light on them, transforming them into a symbol of fixation—religious or nationalistic obsession, which marks them out as unique. Like that once-great nation, we too might easily let ourselves slide into complacency and forget our rightful place among the world’s nations.
The human mind has a natural tendency toward automatism. The same natural mechanism that shows as preoccupation and an inability to let go occurs again and time again, and sometimes we stop assessing reality and give in to it. When we get stuck in a rut, it’s hard to notice that we’ve stopped persevering and instead hit a wall, that we’ve stopped making progress and have instead started backtracking, that we’ve stopped being able to evaluate the situation objectively and have instead become obsessed.
It is easy to tell from the outside when a person becomes obsessed, generally the others feel it firmly before the person themselves. They avoid him like the plague, and he has little chance of ever being successful.
Obsession is a sort of blindness that causes tragic actions and judgments to be made.
Some people have a greater tendency for compulsive behavior than others, but we were all trapped in the same mechanism that caused us to spend our lives frantically pursuing an impossible ideal.
Since the flaw is ingrained in our personalities, we should exercise caution to avoid falling into its trap.
How do you do that?
Awareness. It’s only human to err occasionally. Each turn in the road presents a new difficulty, forcing us to pause and plan our next move. we have to adapt our methods to the ever-shifting nature of the world around us.
Only by releasing our grip are we able to see things with fresh eyes.
And when we find ourselves stuck in an obsessive loop, we need to release the grip and reevaluate our next steps. This is not a failure; rather, it is a tried-and-true method of attaining desirable results.
Push yourself to achieve, yet remember to relax every so often.
Yours,
Dr. Udi Barr
