Digging Deeper: Lessons from Three Feet From Gold
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The man who loves to walk will go further than the man who loves the destination. We get bombarded with results.
Everywhere we look people are posting about their achievements and our peers and colleagues are seemingly winning at every turn. This constant exposure leads us to feel inadequate. It makes us feel as though our efforts aren’t paying off because we don’t see the results that they are.
However, it’s important to remember that we don’t see what is happening behind the scenes. With any meaningful endeavor, we tend to underestimate how long it will take to accomplish.
A story I love to share in regards to this idea is this:
“A man named R. U. Darby moved to the western United States during the gold rush days, with hopes to strike it rich. He discovered a gold mine, but needed machinery to excavate it, so he covered up the mine and returned to Maryland to get funding from relatives.
Once funded, he mined a good amount of ore, but then the vein of gold disappeared. Despite efforts to locate the vein again, he was unsuccessful and eventually quit, selling his machinery to a junk man for a few hundred dollars.
The junk man sought the counsel of a mining engineer who advised that the gold vein would likely be found three feet from where Darby had stopped digging. Sure enough, the junk man found the vein of gold exactly three feet from where Darby left off, and he made millions from the mine.”
Darby gave up three feet from gold… This story highlights how close he was to fulfilling his greatest dreams. Instead, he gave up without seeking counsel and returned to his life as normal.
If you’re anything like me, you feel a gut wrenching feeling at the thought of being so close to greatness and falling short. But, the thing to remember here is Darby didn’t know how close he was. He had no idea that he was only 3 feet from a completely different life.
This same thing happens to millions of people everyday. They give up on their dreams just before they are about to strike gold. Their original plan for achieving such greatness was miscalculated and they gave up in a fictional timeframe that they imposed on themselves.
We don’t get to choose where the gold lies under the earth's surface. The only thing we get to choose is the actions we take above.
With the right amount of consistency and refinement along the way, we enable ourselves to link with the vein and achieve everything we ever wanted.
We talk about setting goals and backwards planning our way to success, but it’s important to remember that this is simply a framework that we create in order to organize our actions on the surface.
It is a system we can follow that removes the ambiguity from our efforts, but ultimately, it is a made up system created by humans and full of flaws. It is a powerful way to organize and focus energy but don’t rely on the timelines to be exact.
Nothing happens exactly according to plan and when identifying a path forward, understand that there will be unforeseen challenges along the way which we need to overcome. Realize that we won’t have all the answers and that growth, real growth, is developed from the ability to acquire the answers and solutions needed to continually overcome challenges and reach the vein of gold.
Learn to love to walk.
Everywhere we look people are posting about their achievements and our peers and colleagues are seemingly winning at every turn. This constant exposure leads us to feel inadequate. It makes us feel as though our efforts aren’t paying off because we don’t see the results that they are.
However, it’s important to remember that we don’t see what is happening behind the scenes. With any meaningful endeavor, we tend to underestimate how long it will take to accomplish.
A story I love to share in regards to this idea is this:
“A man named R. U. Darby moved to the western United States during the gold rush days, with hopes to strike it rich. He discovered a gold mine, but needed machinery to excavate it, so he covered up the mine and returned to Maryland to get funding from relatives.
Once funded, he mined a good amount of ore, but then the vein of gold disappeared. Despite efforts to locate the vein again, he was unsuccessful and eventually quit, selling his machinery to a junk man for a few hundred dollars.
The junk man sought the counsel of a mining engineer who advised that the gold vein would likely be found three feet from where Darby had stopped digging. Sure enough, the junk man found the vein of gold exactly three feet from where Darby left off, and he made millions from the mine.”
Darby gave up three feet from gold… This story highlights how close he was to fulfilling his greatest dreams. Instead, he gave up without seeking counsel and returned to his life as normal.
If you’re anything like me, you feel a gut wrenching feeling at the thought of being so close to greatness and falling short. But, the thing to remember here is Darby didn’t know how close he was. He had no idea that he was only 3 feet from a completely different life.
This same thing happens to millions of people everyday. They give up on their dreams just before they are about to strike gold. Their original plan for achieving such greatness was miscalculated and they gave up in a fictional timeframe that they imposed on themselves.
We don’t get to choose where the gold lies under the earth's surface. The only thing we get to choose is the actions we take above.
With the right amount of consistency and refinement along the way, we enable ourselves to link with the vein and achieve everything we ever wanted.
We talk about setting goals and backwards planning our way to success, but it’s important to remember that this is simply a framework that we create in order to organize our actions on the surface.
It is a system we can follow that removes the ambiguity from our efforts, but ultimately, it is a made up system created by humans and full of flaws. It is a powerful way to organize and focus energy but don’t rely on the timelines to be exact.
Nothing happens exactly according to plan and when identifying a path forward, understand that there will be unforeseen challenges along the way which we need to overcome. Realize that we won’t have all the answers and that growth, real growth, is developed from the ability to acquire the answers and solutions needed to continually overcome challenges and reach the vein of gold.
Learn to love to walk.