Know your Limits

Welcome back to our series on my 7 steps to stand out like a RockStar success in whatever you do. This series is to help you find and learn from both your successes and your failures. Taking a look at your past just like I did to discover these 7 things that when I did them I was successful. I used some of my success and some of my failures to teach in this series. I hope my stories help you learn, both not to use my failures, and to learn from my success and create your own.

Know the limits and test mildly.

Up until now, we’ve been listing rules. Now I want to talk about the limits. There are limits you have on yourself and your company has limits. You have to learn these in both cases. If you live a life over the limit, any success you have will be short-lived.

I started this blog with the story of me talking in Sunday school class about being a RockStar, to which my teacher replied how so many of them did not live past 40, due to the fact they lived over the limits. Most of them pushed the limits that the human body just cannot hold. While we think all the time that living like a Rock Star is about partying as hard as you can. It may work for a while, but it ends in complete destruction. Now you hear the stories of so many of those 80s and 90s RockStars in rehab, dealing with health issues and now having to radically change the way they live. But if you learned to balance things in life and not take them to excess you might be able to enjoy your success longer.

In 1992, as a result of an accident at a truck loading dock, I now have a form of epilepsy. It is something I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life. However I still tried to push my limits. In 2001 that changed for me. I was working a job in which I needed to hide it from my employers. I was exceeding in my job, but was doing something I hated, and it was really time to move on. Still, I tried to stay, but lived life to excess, not eating right, and spending my weekends drinking with all the extra money I had.

Well that came to a halt that December with one day to go till my vacation. I came to work, and, while sitting at my desk getting ready for the day, I had a seizure. This resulted in me being given a different position and in me having to take a cut in pay. I could no longer perform all of my duties due to restrictions that my health condition had put on me, regulations of my company, as well as laws regulating the industry. So while it was fun to live over my limits, the extra money was now gone. My job was now restricted, all I had worked for was now back at ground zero. I knew I should have left this job six months earlier. Funny thing, so did my employer. If only I had accepted the limits of my personal health, my limits of knowing when to quit and move on, I could have avoided the expensive ambulance ride, and kept my good name at my place of employment.

Also don’t spend more money than you make. Learn to live within what you are making money-wise. Don’t push your credit limit to afford what you can’t. Focus on learning things like saving and using money to work for you. Then no matter what happens you can learn to live on whatever money you get. That way you build success because you do not have to worry about money. Too many people live over this limit in America today. If we learn to live on less and don’t always push to keep up with what others say we should have, how much easier it would be to endure whatever job we have to! Then when you get to live and work your dream, you can then have the extra money to spend on a real life.

So with all of this we only have one more thing: Accept the success we have and use it to move to our next step.

I’m Tim Gillette, the Rocker Life Coach. It’s time to live your dream, to love what you do and those you share life with. Get ready to be a RockStar in your world.