You see that log right there, yeah the picture up above.  Take a good look at it.  This log is huge and extremely heavy.   It actually comes from my parent’s place, in rural small town British Columbia.  My dad recently bought a small mill, not for like flour and stuff, but for lumber, you know, to make wood products.  I asked my dad to mill me some 6X6’s for a project I was working on.  Thus I went out to help him, of course we waited for the snow to come :). 

My dad felled this tree and then cut it into 12 foot lengths.  We then hooked it up with a tractor to pull it over to the little mill.  This is standard practice for how my dad uses his mill, and it works all the time.  The tractor pulled and pulled and pulled, but unlike the little engine that could, this tractor couldn’t.  It didn’t even budge this log, like no movement at all.  We tried different configurations, different ways to chain it, we even moved the tractor to a different spot but no matter what we did, it would not budge.  Finally, we took a break and looked at the cut that we had made earlier.  Now look back at the picture, specifically in the bottom left hand corner.  Do you notice something beside the leaf?  Yeah, the little tiny splinter.  Seriously, that little piece of wood that hadn’t been fully cut through, made it so that we could not pull the log with the tractor.  

A little tiny, inconsequential piece of wood, made it so that the log itself couldn’t move forward to the mill.  As a percentage of the log itself, this wouldn’t even register, we are talking less than 1% of the whole log that we were trying to pull.  How did we get it to move?  We snapped the little piece of wood.  It was such a small thing that we didn’t even need to use the chainsaw, it was super easy to just snap it.  

 Just like this stubborn log, you are amazing in so many things.  Literally this log was 99% amazing, only 1% was causing a problem.  That’s hard to even fathom, 99% amazing, that’s almost as effective as bleach…  While my dad and I were trying to pull on that log, we only focused on the 1% of negative that it had.  We didn’t care that we had cut through 99% of the log, or that when we got it over to our mill it would produce at least 4 – 6X6 timbers, what amazing potential. 

This brings me to two thoughts:

1. You are absolutely wonderful and amazing and so fantastic.  Stop focusing on the 1% of your flaws, you are so much more than your insecurities that you have.  Let’s just call a spade a spade, we all have insecurities, some of us just hide them better than others.  Like Dieter F. Uchtdorf once said when talking about judging others “Stop it!”.  Except in this case, stop judging yourself.  You are enough, you are doing your best and it is absolutely enough.  Obviously, we want to progress and become better versions of ourselves, but you are already doing that.  Right now, you are progressing and being legit awesome 99% of the time.  This sounds like we need some valley girl stuff right here, like literally you are totes amaze.  

2. What little tiny itsy bitsy thing could you change?  This is a precarious line that we are walking here, I literally just told you how awesome you are and how you were doing so fantastic right now (which you are).  Let me explain.  When my Dad and I finally noticed the actual problem with our log (not what our anxiety or insecurities were telling us was wrong with us), we just snapped it–really simple.  So what little tiny thing can you snap out of?  What little mistake can you fix by just snapping it out of your life?  I will give you a little personal example.  When I was young I never swore, ever.  As I got older and started doing renovations to junky homes that my wife and I purchased, I developed a habit that I would swear when I was angry because the renovations weren’t working out.  Side note, renovations never go smoothly, just in case you are thinking about doing some.  So I developed a little habit of swearing when I was angry while doing renovations, which grew into occasionally swearing when I wasn’t angry as well.  Another side note, I have plenty of other flaws but this is just an example of one of my small ones.  I mean, I am a Vancouver Canucks fan after all.  Anyways, where were we?  Ah, my swearing.  To me I hadn’t really even noticed this was popping up as much as it was.  When I was made aware of this, I was able to somewhat snap out of it.  I identified something small that was holding me back from progressing to the lumber mill so to speak and I snapped out of it.  

In summary, you are so wonderful, fantastic, insert your favourite adjective here, phenomenal, enlightened, strong, courageous, etc, etc.  So stop focusing on your flaws (this feels like I should talk about something that holds back water and generates electricity here…) See what I did there?  I didn’t say I am perfect yet.  Finally, snap out of something simple!  Like I am meaning super simple, something easy for you to do.  It will help with your forward movement, your progression and it will just plain feel good.

Good luck! If you would like some ideas or some help with any of this, please leave me a comment down below, I would love to hear from you.  Also check out the other cool picture below from actually using the mill.

Kevin Boehmer