Think of the Possibilities

What is the difference between mediocrity and greatness? Possibly not as much as we think.

You know, it really takes very little to make a big difference in our lives and in the world. In professional baseball for example, most batters hit for an average of about .250, which means that they get one hit for every four times at bat. Anyone who hits .300, three hits out of ten, is considered a star. By the end of the season, there are only about a dozen players out of hundreds in the leagues who have maintained a .300 average, and these are the ones who get the big contracts, the acclaim, and the TV commercials.

In other words, the difference between the great players and the ordinary players is only one hit out of twenty! This slim margin of greatness in baseball symbolizes the dynamics of greatness in life, because when we use just a tiny bit more of our potential, we grow, we add to the sum and total of humanity, and we become outstanding human beings.

Now, the purpose of being outstanding is not to win acclaim or glory, but to be more of what we can be, to not ignore those talents and skills lying asleep inside of each of us. If you accept the idea that most of your present limitations are not based on any unchangeable reality, but are rather the result of the beliefs you hold about your reality, then the next step is to deliberately and systematically change those beliefs.

Change the way we think, and we change the way we run our lives, our work, our interactions with others, and we change the way we interact with the world. If you doubt this, how many lives do you touch in a single day – whether you are in the room or not? What difference could you make in their lives, by making one little change in your own? Just think of the possibilities.

This is a flexible mindset. Thinking in possibilities is a skill we can learn quite easily. In fact, we have probably done it before. When was that, and what effect did it have?