The road to success is like climbing a long escalator. In NYC subway station, if you want to go up faster, you stay on the left side because the line moves along quickly. If you’re sleepy in the morning and don’t feel like moving your leg muscles at all, stay on the right. I always go up on the left, because I can’t stay still without holding onto the handrail, which is disgustingly dirty (same goes to the handrail in the train!). Anyway, have you ever felt like you were going to fall down if you just stay still on a really long escalator? I don’t know about you, but I do. I feel like it’s just like our life. If you don’t climb up and keep moving, you’ll be shaken and might eventually fall down. Conclusion: you’re in the comfort zone. However, if you decide to go forward, you’ll move ahead of the pack so much quicker and also skip the headache of falling. And even if you do fall, you’d still be better off than if you had not climbed up at all.

So, life’s nothing but an escalator ride. If you don’t move faster than the crowd, you will not stand out from the crowd. If you don’t stretch yourself more than most people do, you will not get the rewards you’ve wanted to get. It’s interesting how we sometimes yearn for something fabulous, yet we do not take any actions to procure it. We know we will get it if we work harder than we do right now, but we give ourselves many excuses not to do it: one of them being too busy (read my post on this).

If you seriously want to succeed, you have to break the old habits that stand in the way between success and yourself. Walk 25% faster than you currently do and you’ll be ahead of the pack. Read 25% more than you currently do and you’ll learn much more than the rest in say 1 year. And no, it doesn’t have to be something as daunting as starting a business even if that’s one of your goals. You don’t want to give yourself too much pressure in the beginning, or you’d most likely give up very soon. You should just start altering your daily routines so that your motions will be in sync with your thinking. After all, actions speak louder than words. There’s no use to learn and talk about a great philosophy if you don’t act on it. Set smaller milestones so that you know you’re progressing, not just blindly charging forward without a direction. Keep hitting the small milestones and you will be on your way to the growth you’ve always dreamed of.

And now, think about a funeral that you attended (it doesn’t have to be depressing). Think about the people who stood to speak at the funeral of their friend. Then, everyone huddled around the tombstone of the dead. What do you see on the tombstone? The Dash (mp3 by Delatorro McNeal, a poem written by Linda Ellis). The dash between the birth date and the very last day of the person’s life. The beginning and the end were very important, but what was even more important was what happened between them. After all, what really matters is how you lived and loved and treated everyone around you while you were still alive. Be a little more tolerant and try to understand the way other people feel. Put yourself in someone else’s shoes and you might have a totally opposite (and often empathetic) perception about the person’s views. Begin to love those people in your lives like you’ve never loved before because you never know if you will still have the chance to do so 10 years later, 1 year later, next week, or tomorrow. Life changes too rapidly for anyone to predict. Finally, there’s a question for you from the poem: when your eulogy is being read, with your life’s actions to rehash, would you be proud of the things they say about how you spent your dash?

Think about it for the next 5 minutes. After that, gather all the energy you have in your life to work towards making the dash that you want and don’t let a single drop of energy follow you after the end of your journey. Remember these: think bigger than you are, start smaller than your goal, grow faster than the rest, and die emptier than a banker’s heart!

(Picture by David A. Villa from Flickr, Thanks!)

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