As I sit on my deck overlooking the Mississippi River, there is an American eagle flying overhead. With several large eagle’s nests near our house, it’s not uncommon to see as many as 7 or 8 eagles at a time. There are two huge trees on either side of our house and the eagles often sit in their branches and survey the water below. These birds are a beauty to behold and watching them from just a few feet away on my deck has given me a deeper appreciation for how majestic and complex they are.
There is a well known scripture in the Bible that speaks of “mounting up with wings like eagles.” If you have never seen an eagle “mount up” then you may think this only refers to the eagle floating effortlessly on the wind. In fact, some versions translate the word Hebrew word for mount as “soar with wings like eagles” and that’s probably because most people have only seen an eagle that is already in flight.
I’ve seen this many times up close because the eagles don’t like it when I come too close on the deck. There is no way to describe the sound of the power behind those wings as these giant birds take off. The look of determination and extreme focus in their eyes is awe inspiring and really gives new understanding to what it means to “MOUNT with wings like eagles”.
True success rarely happens overnight whether in nature or business. I’ve seen the eagle’s nest with the babies in it – not quite ready to take flight and dependent on their parents for their basic needs. I’ve seen the babies that have recently left the nest and don’t yet have the beautiful white head and tail — they really don’t stand out much from any other bird of prey.
So often the same thing happens in our every day lives and throughout our virtual tour business. We see a small business owner whose business seems to run itself, we see an athlete who breaks records running a marathon and doesn’t seem to break a sweat, we see people whose marriages look like a perpetual honeymoon. We compare ourselves to them and think that they must have some special gift we don’t. What we often don’t see in these cases is what these people looked like in the beginning…before they reached a level where the wind picked them up and allowed them to soar effortlessly.
I’ve been there — When I started running, I could barely run for 60 seconds straight and yet I am now six weeks away from running a half marathon. When we started in virtual tour photography, we couldn’t GIVE our tours away and now we have a thriving national virtual tour business. We travel all over the country photographing healthcare virtual tours and much of our business comes from referrals and repeat business. The reason that so many people don’t stick to a new venture is that they lack that determination and focus that the eagle has when he first takes off. They assume it was going to be easy at first or on the other extreme, they see how hard they have to work in the beginning and assume that it’s always going to be that hard.
What I have never seen is an eagle turn around and come back to the tree and say, “This is too hard”. That is because the eagle knows instinctively that by putting in the initial effort necessary to mount up then eventually he will catch the updrafts and be able to soar to heights that other birds couldn’t even imagine.
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