“Why Everything’s Possible (the wooden plank story)”

By Darren Hardy  

The power of your why is what gets you to stick through the grueling, mundane, and laborious.  All of the hows will be meaningless until your whys are powerful enough.  Until you’ve set your desire and motivation in place, you’ll abandon any new path you seek to better your life.  If your why-power – your desire – isn’t great enough, if the fortitude of your commitment isn’t powerful enough, you’ll end up like every other person who makes a New Year’s resolution and gives up too quickly and reverts to sleepwalking through poor choices.  Let me give you an analogy to help bring it home:

If I were to put a ten-inch-wide, thirty-foot long wooden plank on the ground and say, “If you walk the length of the plank, I’ll give you twenty dollars,” would you do it?  Of course, it’s an easy twenty bucks.  But what if I took the same plank and made a roof-top “bridge” between two 100-story buildings? That same twenty dollars for walking the thirty-foot plank no longer looks desirable or even possible, does it?  You’d look at me and say, “Not on your life.” However, if your child was on the opposite building, and that building was on fire, would you walk the length of the plank to save him or her?  Without question and immediately – you’d do it, twenty dollars or not.

Why is it the first time I asked you to cross that sky-high plank, you said no way, yet, the second time you wouldn’t hesitate?  The risks and the dangers are the same.  What changed?  Your why changed – your reason for wanting to do it. You see, when the reason is big enough, you will be willing to perform almost any how.