A couple of weeks ago my good friend Matt Church wrote a great newsletter about

being a demand for insanely great

.

He said that great things require a push, a struggle, a stubborn attachment to making things better. He also acknowledged that might seem at odds with advice we receive to ‘let go, surrender, be without expectation.’

Which was interesting because it hit my inbox just as I arrived in Spain for a one-month meditation retreat.

I’m doing a lot of meditating, and learning to be more present. To accept everything exactly as it is. To surrender, and be without expectation.

And I’ve been pondering how to reconcile that with the great things that I want to achieve, and the projects that matter in my life and in business.

Eckhart Tolle in the Power of Now gives a great analogy that I think explains it way better than I could. He says (and this is from memory, so it won’t be word for word) that if you are stuck in quicksand, there is no use fighting the quicksand. If you are in the quicksand, you can’t be anywhere else. Resisting it won’t change anything, and will probably make your situation worse. He says the best thing to do is to surrender to being in the quicksand.

However he also says that you can be committed to a future where you are no longer in the quicksand.

So I’m attempting to completely surrender to life exactly how it is now (which admittedly is not that hard when I’m on a retreat in Spain for a month). Of course I can never change how my life is now, it is how it is. I can only change it in the future.

And at the same time I’m committed to a bunch of things in the future … and hopefully some of them will be insanely great.

Love to hear your thoughts – how to you reconcile surrender and improvement? You can leave them below.