What's Holding You Back

There comes a time, or many times, in everyone's life when they feel as if life has not been working out as they had hoped. Often times this prompts the question of what has been holding them back. More often than than not, what's been holding them back is themselves.

A lot of my articles recently have dealt with these kind of ideas but I think it is worth reiterating. You need to know what your goals are in life and you need to ask yourself if you can really bear the thought of looking back twenty years from now and realizing that you've accomplished none of them. Wasted time is such a huge thing in our society and it's crushing to the would-be entrepreneur. Another death blow to your progress towards your goals can be trying to pursue something that you really know nothing about. Having a great business idea is one thing, having the knowledge, time, and will power to take the idea from a dream to a reality can be quite another. Investing time and money into areas that you have no business being in won't help you achieve anything. Pursue knowledge before you invest.

A couple months ago my family and I were taking a trip out of state for a couple days. The day we were supposed to leave I looked up the directions on the internet and hit the print button. The printer proceeded to make a series of loud bangs and was shaking violently. An orange error light came on but gave no indication of the problem. I pulled the paper out, put it back in, checked the cartridges, and couldn't find anything wrong. Print. Wrrrr, bang, bang , bang, shake, orange error light. Again, I looked over the whole printer and still couldn't find anything wrong. I repeated this whole process a couple more times and finally saw what the problem was. Inside the printer, all the way over to the right side was a pink plastic Easter egg that was sitting right in the path of the cartridge carriage. Oh, the joys of having a toddler. I removed the offending egg and the printer started working just fine.

Many times in life, we are our own worst enemy and hold ourselves back from accomplishing anything. But sometimes what's holding us back is a pink Easter egg in our printer.