Giving Up

One of the costs of achievement is giving up your ideas about yourself. At some point, you will have to let go of a story you believe about who you are, what you do, or how you got there.

Maybe you wrote a story about yourself when you were young, and the story says, “I will always do x” or “I will never do y.”

Maybe someone else told you the story, and you came to believe it: “You better be like this” or “You shouldn’t be like that.”

But maybe those exact stories are the reason you sometimes feel stuck. Maybe those stories aren’t true, but you’ve internalized them so much that you don’t even get to test them and find out.

Sure, those stories might be true some of the time, but to really achieve something worthwhile, there will come a time when you have to pay the price: you will have to question the truth of those stories and accept that you can only be what you are - not what the stories you and others believe say that you are.