Countering Discouragement - Impossible Logic

Why is it that all the best quotes come from President Uchtdorf?

But honestly, there are many good quotes like this, from Elder Holland's quote, "God doesn’t care nearly as much about where you have been as He does about where you are and, with His help, where you are willing to go," from a talk titled Remember Lot's Wife, to a Japanese proverb, "Fall down seven times, get up eight."

It seems that life is fraught with struggles, and in those many struggles, we occasionally fail. What happens then is that the strong, persistent people get back up, dust themselves off, and move forward. The people who learn to do that as frequently as they fall are the ones who really get places in life. I want to be more like them.

When I hear about people who do great things, I see that it's often the case that they have strong motivation, that they know what they want and they want it badly enough to push through the struggles, pick themselves up whenever they fall short, and keep trying to do what to others may seem impossible until they actually accomplish their goals. I could really use that kind of motivation, that drive, to push through the discouragement of the occasional failure and reach for the unreachable success. That reminds me of a song - The Impossible Dream, from The Man of La Mancha.

I first memorized and thought about the lyrics of that song while I was on my mission. My companion at the time (I can't remember who it was exactly) thought that the lyrics were discouraging, thinking that if the dream is impossible and the start is unreachable, why should a person even bother trying? My thoughts is that life isn't so much about reaching our goals or accomplishing great things, though it's absolutely wonderful when those things happen. I think that the purpose of life has more to do with the strength we gain as we struggle to accomplish things that may be impossible and are certainly nearly so.

To me, the song helps me come to grips with the fact that what we're trying to do, overcoming human nature and achieving self-mastery and, ultimately, perfection, may be impossible in this life, so if you fail, don't worry about it. Like my post from ages past, Dare to be Awesome, said, when we set impossibly high goals for ourselves, and we know that those goals are unreachable, it's not so much of a let-down when we fall short of those goals. It's not so discouraging as if we try to do something we know can do, and fail, because when we know that what we're trying to do is impossible, we've accepted the failure and come to grips with it, even before they happen.

Maybe that's been my problem lately. Perhaps my goals have been too realistic.

This may not make sense to most of you. It could be that my thought process is staggeringly abstract, or that I'm actually slightly insane, but when I realize that what I'm trying to do is actually really hard, it makes the occasionally set-back that much more understandable, so rather than beating myself up about not doing something that I easily could have done, I can dust myself off, admit that I'm still human, and try again. And since I know I'm just going to fail again, I won't be so discouraged when I do.

Does that logic work? I don't know. But who cares? I'm the one who's using it, and it feels like it works for me.