No, that’s not a typo. I really do have one.
I spend a lot of time working on my computer each day. She spends a lot of time resting on the other office chair. Like right now for example she’s relaxing after her breakfast. She is a beautiful 4year-old calico and we love her. But… she can be pushy.
Real pushy.
Usually it has to do with the three things she wants most. Breakfast, lunch, or dinner. At about 11:30 or so she wakes up fro her morning nap and her “pushyness” begins. She tries to gain entry on to my lap through the small space between me and the keyboard.
If she doesn’t make it the first time she tries again and again until she succeeds. If that doesn’t work she’ll jack it up a notch. She’ll jump up onto my desk and walk over until she’s standing right smack in front of the flat screen monitor. The same one I’m trying to look at while I’m typing. Then she purrs loudly.
See how pushy that is?
I gently lift her up and hug her. I’ll explain to her that she has to wait because it’s not lunchtime yet. But she just buries her muzzle into the crook of my arm causing words to appear on the screen that even my spell-checker won’t recognize.
So I take and set her down on the other chair and return to my work. In a few nanoseconds her royal pushyness is back on her crusade promoting her personal agenda.
Think there’s a lesson in motivation here?
What if you were like that? Do you think that you’d attain the goals that you set for yourself?
Not exactly. See the fact is that, while being a cute soft silky-coated house cat and being a little pushy might be tolerable nobody likes pushy people.
Now it sounds like we have a problem here.
After all I talk a lot about the attribute of persistence and determination as a natural part of your immune mindset. No one can ever argue that those are not desirable traits to have. Right?
Right. But looking pushy might be a problem. As I’ve said nobody likes it and besides, no point in banging our head against a brick wall. Getting to a place where a successful conclusion might be ours sometimes requires us to make the decision to quit what’s not working and to switch to something that does.
Intelligent persistence I call it. You’re not actually giving up you’re just adjusting the trim of your sails a bit according to the wind. Successful people do it all the time. There’s no loss of face because your eye is still on the desired end result.
Being able to quickly adapt is important to your success. It’s also something that’s part of the package I call human mindset immunity. And that means developing a mindset that automatically buffers all the negative effects of failure even while they’re happening. Really important if you’re going to survive long enough to get across the finish line.
It’s just being smart not pushy.
Leave that to my cat.