Magic Briefs

"Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect." 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am 42 and I am clothed in my "right" mind.

I possess a sufficiency of Faith, Love and Hope because of my God. 

I am happily married to one of the "great women" of my generation. 

I earn a comfortable living by excelling at something I love. 

My family is intact and intentional. 

My friends love me more than I deserve.

My enemies hate me less than I deserve.

I have learned to thrive outside my place of origin. 

I am now a leader because others choose to follow me. 

I am 42 and still alive. 

For the longest time I believed I was just incredibly lucky. How else to explain the unbelievable success my life had become? It occasionally caused me heartache to believe that my fortune lay in a benevolent deity who clearly played favorites. But as I was one of the favorites I chose to be grateful to have stumbled upon that favor.

Cause and effect. If the answer for my life is "magical" then there can be no way to replicate my successes or learn from my failures. On the other hand, if that life can be understood naturally then I can learn from my mistakes and replicate my successes. So what are the causes that create successful effects? 

Here is my suggested list of essential ingredients to create success:

Ambition

Courage 

Competency

Ambition:

This is the hubris that believes itself destined to achieve things that are perceived to be beyond reach. It requires a belief that boundaries are made to be broken and obstacles are merely opportunities to overcome. It is the certainty that today's successful models can be improved upon and yesterday's cultural certainties will eventually be tomorrow's historic eccentricities. Ambition tells its owner that they can reach beyond the length of their arm. 

Courage:

I've met many people who believes themselves destined for great things. Most never venture beyond that Belief into the fields of actualization. I believe Courage is where you find the fuel to propel ambition into action. This is the mindset that expects life to be hard and is prepared to dig deep to overcome adversity. It tells its owner that nothing worth having is cheap, and nothing worth winning is easy. 

Competency:

I've too often sat in the room with young men who tell me they are "Called" to be the master of their own destiny and they clearly have the courage to go do it, but they insist they have no need to wait around for sufficient preparation. I raise an eyebrow and listen with astonishment as men under 30 tell me they are ready to bear the burden of leadership. They may have the necessary ambition and courage but they lack the prerequisite competency to thrive in this brutally Darwinian world. I believe that Competency only comes through years of toil. I believe that it can never be gifted, nor stolen, for it must always be purchased. The price is usually 10,000 hours of practice through hard labor. Competency must be mastered and it can only be mastered by those willing to endure an apprenticeship. Too few today have the patience to wait for competency and so they spend far longer flailing in frantic effort hoping to succeed though that stroke of luck that they believe was the magic element in the successes they see in another's life. 

Of the three elements that I believe are essential for success the last is the one that must be honed constantly and tirelessly for it to remain sharp. You hone it through hard work. Through sitting down and crafting clear goals that can be measured. By crafting vision that can be implemented. By vigorously debriefing everything that we do so that we can know what it is we are doing and how successful that deed is in relation to our stated goals.

I have 5 roles in my life that I aim to do with excellence. I regularly sit down and evaluate how successful I am at those 5 roles. All five are lofty goals far beyond my current reach. They require great stores of courage for me to actually attempt to reach them and lastly they need vast amounts of competency for me to excel at them.

I rarely rely on magic except for the things that are clearly impossible. Everything else is within my remit and I believe my God expects me to be an industrious and ingenues steward with what He has entrusted me with.

My life originates in God, it is propelled by God and guided by God, but God expects me to do the actual work of living that life.

Do you have the requisite ambition, courage and competency to actually live the life you've been given?