Sorry folks; there IS more to the 10.000 hours success story. Of course!

. As always there is a bit more to the story of 10,000 hours than we think. How come the Beatles and Bill Gates could stick to doing what they were doing and avoid the trap we normal mortals seem to fall into most of the time? I am talking about the trap of stopping just 2 inches from gold, of giving up before we hit the jackpot.

John and I on our way to striking gold here and loving every minute of it.

There is no doubt we are all doing things, we are all striving for something.
But how come they kept going until they made it and we don’t.

Let me begin with a story.

Once upon a time there was a man who was driven to give his wife everything she wanted, including a baby.
In order to do that, he thought he needed money and lots of it. So he bought a piece of land in gold country, put his life and the baby on hold and started digging, driven to find the gold that would give him and his wife what they wanted. The gold-digger dug day and night for many, many years but alas he never found any gold.
One day he woke up unable to dig any more.
He just gave up, called it quits and sold his land. He felt like such a failure because there he was with no money and no baby.
The new owner of the land dug only for two weeks before he struck the gold. This gold that could have been the gold-diggers had he not given up just 2 inches away from it; so near and yet so far.

The moral of the story is… what is it that motivates you to put your 10,000 hours in and not to give up when the jackpot is so near?

What kept Bill Gates and the Beatles going and what stopped the gold-digger in the end?
The difference is . . .
Bill Gates and the Beatles came from attraction and being pulled forward towards their desires whereas the gold-digger came from compulsion.
They came from love and excitement, the gold-digger came from force and need.

If I look at myself, I am more in the gold-digger camp than in the Bill Gates and the Beatles camp, I do force and compulsion to exhaustion very well too.
Thus initially the gold-digger in me found all this attraction hellishly hard to understand AND apply.

I can see how I could have missed out on lots of things in my life had I continued with this gold-digger pattern of action.  I could have easily gotten cold feet during the emigration process to New Zealand; there was plenty to keep me in Holland.
Looking back on that time it was nature and living life differently that attracted me and called me forward.
At the time that wasn’t glaringly obvious to me though; it was just a faint flicker, which I somehow noticed. Thank goodness that I didn’t brush it off and that I kept going.

When the time came for me to give up my job, I was very reluctant to make that jump. My ability to recognize the attraction here was extremely weak, all I saw was disappearing cash flow.
I needed a lot of encouragement from John to jump to entrepreneurship and even then I nearly didn’t do it.
I am aware that on this occasion I came so close to giving up and ignoring the path that would take my heart and all of ME along with it.
As you can imagine, I am so pleased that I DID jump.
If I had ignored this inner calling, I would have always been searching for the gold in New Zealand and always been just 2 inches away from striking it.
Of this I am certain because I would not be sitting here in this Garden of Eden right now working on line.

Living here has given me the time to be still enough to recognize more clearly that my heart needs to speak up and be the guide.

But learning about that and then sticking to it is really, really hard; at least I think so.
How do I keep going, keep moving forward, when sometimes it feels that the results will never show up and I fear that what I’ve put in already is no good.
When do I know that I’m so close to gold I can almost touch it?
When I look at what I’m doing now; developing a business and trusting that the income will come, let me tell you, the gold-digger side of me doesn’t like this at all and it wants to quit. NOW!
Quieting down my little voice to hear my heart speak is another steep learning curve, one that my logical mind wants to put an end to, NOW!

Keep going required rigorous practice, because shortcuts or cheating won’t work.
I’d become so used to cheating, hiding and shortcuts, bending the rules and using everything else I’d learnt in life to get by with the least amount of effort.

It is however this rigorous practice guided by attraction and a pull forward that makes Bill Gates, the Beatles and people like Gandhi too for that matter, stand out.
To strike gold I have to do daily tasks with integrity, authenticity and courage . . . AND involve all of ME.  Believing in what I do and loving it with all my heart, is a must.
With that comes the willingness to stay on course even when I start thinking that surely I’ve done enough NOW, there’s nothing left in my tank SO I want to see the results NOW or I quit.

That is what I have come to understand from my hours of questioning.
What is more; I no longer want anybody to stop 2 inches short either, not if I can help it.
How many people, women give up too soon, tired from all the have-to’s and obligations on their paths?
How many haven’t taken the time to look at how far they have come?
How many just don’t know how to take the next step or whom to ask for help?
Or how many lost sight of their end goal, became confused and overwhelmed in the last few inches and simply gave up?

All the years that I stuck with the Life Leverage material have shown me that this is valuable stuff, but as I said it does require rigor and stamina to keep going while learning to discern between being driven by compulsion and being called forward by attraction.
This is not an overnight wonder.
That is why I am ready for WomenLikeMe, our online learning community.
I won’t have it, having myself or any other women giving up and stopping 2 inches from gold.

I am certain that other women like me will enjoy the clarity of having explanations that are aligned with their hearts, explanations that will keep them on their path to gold.

Nobody needs to fall into the trap of stopping within 2 inches from striking gold.
Through WomenLikeMe, I want to make sure that this won’t happen to any more women like YOU.