the road less traveled

It is not easy to take the road less traveled.  The task is double what you might expect.  You of course have the planned difficulties of navigating a path few before you have taken, and tangible obstacles aside, trying to meet your own ideas of success is one of the hardest challenges to overcome.  You alone are responsible for defining success, and so you have no one to turn to when your resolve is shaken.  It is inevitable that there will be times when you will question your chosen path, but again, this is expected, so your resolve grows twice as strong to compensate.   

However, the most difficult challenge of all is unforeseen.  It is in reference to naysayers, but nobody writes about this in books about "following your dreams."  For clarification, a naysayer is NOT anyone who says you are wrong.  A naysayer is instead someone who habitually expresses negative or pessimistic views without credible backing.  If you were building a nuclear bomb and Albert Einstein said you were screwing up, you should listen.  If Frank Sinatra said you were screwing up, you should be skeptical.

Thats not to say that Frank is not wise or successful; he's very good at what he does and he's seen a lot.  The secret to success in any endeavor is to surround yourself with people better than yourself and listen to them, and I would take all the advice I could get from Frank Sinatra.  I might even listen to him the first few times he tried to discourage me from building a bomb, but if Frank told me every time he saw me that my bomb looked like crap, and Albert was telling me the opposite, I'd probably try to avoid Frank from now on.  You of course fight naysayers by removing them from your life.  Bye Frank!  There, that was easy! 

However, nobody can prepare you for the naysayers that you can't get away from.  Imagine if naysayer Frank was your best friend.  Things just got a whole lot harder.  Now you've got two sets of expectations to live up to, and although you keep telling yourself that only one set matters, yours, you know that Frank isn't going to support you until you fulfill his expectations too. 

The desire for approval from people you love and care for can sometimes be enough to squash the life right out of you, but you have to focus on the things about these people that inspire you.  When you are truly doing what you think you were put on this earth to do, and one of these people tells you that your life is passing you by, focus on the inspirational paperweight that they gave you long ago and have since forgotten, the one that has guided almost every moment of your life since you first read it, and read it again:

"What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?"

Comments

[Daniel Miller]

Expectations suck and increase in suckage the closer the person with expectations is. Have not figured out how to deal with this one. Good to hear others are dealing with this too.

[Tyler Fields]

Ya, the worst part is when you start withholding info to spare yourself a lecture, which only breeds distrust and more lectures. I learned this the hard way.