I have a lot of ambition but I don’t always know what to do with it. I’ve spent a lot of my life exerting a ton of energy trying to get a hold of things that didn’t matter all that much. You could have powered New York City with the amount of energy that I expended trying to be popular when I was growing up and I now regret a lot of that pursuit. I’ve also wasted way too much energy worrying what people think about me and I’m trying to reinvest that energy in something more productive.

What I’ve learned is that sometimes moving forward feels a whole lot like moving backward. When you devote yourself to character development and internal change, it can feel like a waste of time. Your world becomes about paradigm shifting and learning different perspectives. Your values change and your priorities begin to shift. Changes like these can feel sometimes like a waste of time or perhaps peripheral but the opposite is actually true.

Real success is really quite similar to a slingshot. You keep pulling back more and more and more. As you pull back tension begins to build. You may be tempted to let go prematurely but that would not give you the desired outcome. You want that stone to fly out of the slingshot with maximum speed to hit the target that you’ve set your sights on. So you keep pulling back until the tension in the sling is so great that you can’t do anything but let go. You almost didn’t even need to focus on letting go because you focused on pulling back until you basically couldn’t do it anymore.

In the same way, if you devote yourself to true character growth and development, a time will come when you can’t pull back any longer. I believe that this process is also known as being filled with the Holy Spirit but that’s another subject.

Are you more focused on internal development or external development? If the main thing you focus on is external development then you won’t get maximum impact. If you do the hard and oftentimes invisible work of internal development, there will come a point when you can’t pull back any longer. The time to let go will inevitably come and the results will be astounding!!