Progress is made by attempting to do what has never been done before. Vanguards in any field or discipline go where none have gone before with results that inspire and delight the rest of us, although sometimes only eventually.
My adviser has supported my goals from day one. We are, what you would call, "a good fit." God Bless him. When I asked him about the possibility of completing the four-year program in three years, he said it was possible. He said it was less about intelligence and more about focus. Although not the norm, he gave me examples of who and how it had been done before.
I have a vision for my dissertation proposal. I believe it is possible (I'm looking right at it when I dream). I have laser-like focus. I am committed to logging the hours that it takes, treating obstacles as stop signs and not dead ends. I have brilliant mentors and angels aiding me every step of the way because I feel no shame to ask for help along the way. I'd be foolish not to ask for help, there are some incredibly brilliant people at UCLA! In the words of my mother, "thank you, Yesus" and amen.
What we feed our brain, in terms of reading and listening matters, I think. When I first started taking art classes with a mentor, I went for the art making. But I stuck around 13 years because of his nurturing and encouragement. One day, I asked him how he managed to be so positive and he said that he listened to positive visualization tapes on his commute. What are you reading and listening to? Tune out the negative inner critic. Here are more quotes from Paolo Coelho that I blame for some of my optimistic thoughts and out-of-this-world dreams (found on fr.steven: blogging about life)...
“And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”
“It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.”
“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”
“If someone isn’t what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.”
“Everything tells me that I am about to make a wrong decision, but making mistakes is just part of life. What does the world want of me? Does it want me to take no risks, to go back to where I came from because I didn’t have the courage to say “yes” to life?”
“‘My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer,’ the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky. ‘Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.’”
“Love is an untamed force. When we try to control it, it destroys us. When we try to imprison it, it enslaves us. When we try to understand it, it leaves us feeling lost and confused.”
“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”
“There was a language in the world that everyone understood, a language the boy had used throughout the time that he was trying to improve things at the shop. It was the language of enthusiasm, of things accomplished with love and purpose, and as part of a search for something believed in and desired.”
“What you still need to know is this: before a dream is realized, the Soul of the World tests everything that was learned along the way. It does this not because it is evil, but so that we can, in addition to realizing our dreams, master the lessons we’ve learned as we’ve moved toward that dream. That’s the point at which, as we say in the language of the desert, one “dies of thirst just when the palm trees have appeared on the horizon.”
