Hold Your Standard

It’s helpful to have others around you to hold yourself accountable. You don’t always need to pursue alone. With others either holding you to a certain level or pursuing the same thing as you, it gets easier to remain motivated and committed to the task at hand. But group accountability isn’t what you must always rely on. You need to hold yourself to a standard, your personal standard, because those around you will often fail to do the same. By committing to a standard of excellence you know is your true body of work, you can look in the mirror and honestly assess if you did your best, or if you need to be better in the next trial. No one else has the capability to hold you accountable, to hold you to your individual standard, than yourself. Set the standard and live your standard.

When you have a personal standard, it becomes more than just a mantra, it becomes your creed. You alone know when you live up or fail to live up to this creed. It becomes a part of you if you take it seriously enough. With a personal creed, with your personal standard, you can rely on yourself when you don’t have the luxury of others. It’s your life and having an individual standard to hold yourself to helps you retain control.

With your personal standard held at your core, it’s important to not let others infiltrate and poison the creed you hold dear. The world has evolved to accept that just participating is good enough. That if you don’t hit your goal, it’s okay because you tried your best. Don’t believe it’s okay because someone else tells you it is. Don’t let others define your process after you have spent weeks, months, and years living to your standard. You alone know the capabilities of what living to your standard can do for you.

You can let others soften the blow of any missed goal externally, but internally it should only fuel your fire more. They don’t know what you went through leading up to your performance. They weren’t there day in and day out as you held yourself to your standard. They think what you did was good enough because they lack the insight, knowledge, belief, and fundamental fire that your standard—your creed provides. All failures and shortcomings are opportunities to learn more based on the feedback you receive. You can accept your failure and still get back into the laboratory to refine your processes so you never feel the same sense of failure again.

You need to hold yourself to your standard, no matter what else other people tell you. You alone know what is up to your standard. You alone know how it feels to be so close to your goal and then fall short. You alone know it’s not okay, it’s not good enough because you tried. You alone know that with any failure comes an opportunity to regroup and attack again. You alone know what it’s like to hold yourself to your standard.