Credit Improvement:  Achieving the (seemingly) Impossible

 

Are you facing an impossible task?  Do you have a huge project ahead of you that is overwhelming and you just don’t know where to start?  Maybe you’ve accumulated a large amount of debt and don’t know how to begin paying things off?  Maybe you have a business project or idea that you know will make a huge difference in your life, but you avoid it because it’s just too big?

 

Brian Tracy, a well-known motivational speaker, tells a story from his youth about an adventure that changed his life and way of thinking.  Traveling through southern Europe with a group of friends on bicycles, they decided, for some unknown reason, that it would be fun to travel across the great Sahara Desert and see the wonders of Africa beyond.  They sold their bicycles and came up with enough money to buy an old Land Rover, and off they went.

 

Along the way, they encountered many hardships and were lucky they didn’t lose their lives.  In his words, “the labor was excruciating, the progress was slow, and the pleasure was non-existent.”  But it was during this “adventure” that Tracy learned a most important life-lesson that taught him how to tackle large, impossible tasks.

 

For many years, the French controlled Algeria and it was often necessary for army personnel to cross the desert quickly.  Satellite navigation wasn’t available then, maps were useless, roads couldn’t be built on the constantly shifting sands, and compass navigation was tedious and often ineffective.  So the French set up a simple system of oil barrel markers.  Spaced exactly 5 kilometers apart along the chosen path, the French placed black 55 gallon oil barrels atop permanent poles across the desert.

 

If you follow this path, you can always see exactly 2 oil barrels at all times – the one you came from and the one you are going to.  So as Tracy learned, he didn’t have to cross the entire desert all at once – he just needed to focus on getting to the next oil barrel.

 

As you face your impossible tasks, try to break up the task into small, well-defined steps.  Then to complete the impossible task, you’ll just need to take it “one oil barrel at a time”.  Keep your focus on completing only this smaller task – don’t fret about the rest of the overwhelming project.  Get one piece done, and then move on to the next piece.

 

Need to pay off a huge amount of debts?  Start with the smallest one.  Make the minimum payments on everything else, but focus all your “extra” resources towards paying this one off.  Then move to the next smallest one, etc.  For that large project, do something TODAY that will get you to the first oil barrel – just 15 minutes maybe.  Then get to the next oil barrel tomorrow…