Different and Differently

There is a world of difference between doing something different and doing something differently.

When you do something different, you are essentially making the same mistakes, but only in a different situation.

When you do something differently, you are amending your pattern of behavior and tackling the same situation in, hopefully, a more effective way.

Think back to when you were a child. Did you learn to walk the first time you tried?

Most likely, you did not. However, you tried different ways to walk until you finally found a way to walk.

The difference between success and failure is not doing something different, but doing something differently.

This allows the greatest teacher of all, experience, to lend his hand to helping you succeed.

True success depends on doing things differently. After all, you may have tried to do something ten different ways and, as a result of this, you have ten different methods that do not work. This allows you to use these experiences to find a way that does work. Conversely, if you try soccer and are not good at it, and then try rugby, and then cricket and then tennis and are not successful in either, how can you use these unrelated experiences to help you perform well in any one sport? The secret of success is to find one thing and continually do it differently until you find the way that works. Ironically, in life, it is often the most simple thing that is stopping us from succeeding and simplicity takes time to reveal itself to us!