In recent blogs I’ve introduced you to people achieving some amazing results through perserverance. My hope is that their stories are inspiring. I realize however, that sometimes people will see a story, such as these, and conclude, “but I can’t do anything that monumental” and actually become less inspired, rather than more.

That’s incredibly unfortunate, because there is often something amazing in showing up to a “regular” life every day. It takes work. It takes commitment.  And an uninspired conclusion comes from what I call “snapshot” thinking. It means to look at what you see in one image and think that, what you are looking at, is the whole story.

When we look at a snapshot of a model its easy to conclude that the woman (or man) is beautiful and we can’t possibly compete. But what we fail to consider is that the person photographed doesn’t actually look like the photograph either. The photo has probably been airbrushed to remove imperfection. It has also been staged, and in our normal everyday lives, most of us don’t have stage hands.

The people I introduced you to don’t have airbrushed lives.   It was their effort, and mostly their attitudes that made them incredible. But what I presented to you was the snapshot version. It is the end result. I didn’t describe to you in detail how many times they curled up in a ball and cried, got overwhelmed with fear or just plain failed. Maybe those moments lasted minutes or days at a time. But they kept at it. They got knocked down along the way, but they kept getting up (eventually).

Sometimes its harder than others to get up. It’s harder to keep going when the finish line appears so far in the distance. I’d like to introduce you to a video that I find very inspiring as a source of motivation.  Unfortunately at  just over six minutes,  it’s too large to load directly on my site so I’ve included only the link.  I think you’ll find it worth your time. Here is an excerpt:

Pain is temporary. It may last for a minute, an hour, a day, or even a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit however, it will last forever.

You can find the video here: