Your Success in Life
Without It, You’re Dead In the Water
You have to set big, hairy, and audacious goals to do great things.
But
setting the goals themselves is only the first part of the equation. If
you want to do anything great, you have to learn the art of following
through.
That’s where we slip — because taking action is scary.
It takes tenacity to follow through on our goals and you need the
audacity to set a huge scary goal down and tell the world you’re going
to achieve it no matter what.
It takes guts to claim a piece of the pie for your own. But you know what else it takes, and a lot of it?
It takes patience. So much patience. It can take years
of patience, or even a decade of grueling work before you start to reap
big results from all the time and hard work you’ve put in, and it can
be frustrating as hell.
The
solution? Learn how to be more patient than everybody else and revel in
the hard work, no matter what anyone else tells you to do. That’s the
only way to reach your personal success.
There’s No Clear-Cut, Easy Way to Success
You’ve heard all the clichés. Rome wasn’t built in a day, it’s a marathon not a sprint, you need 10,000 hours to be great, etc.
None of that helps, though. Neither does telling you to be patient because you want it all to come true now.
Who wouldn’t want that, right?
But
even when looking down the vast tunnel where the light at the end
signifies your future success, you still wonder why despite your best
efforts, it’s just not happening for you. It’s only human to wonder and beat ourselves up for not being successful yet, after all.
I
don’t care what you’re doing. Working on a novel, building an audience,
creating a body of work… it all takes time. But time is our greatest
asset. We have lots of it, even though we squander a lot of it.
The question becomes how to best use the time we have to fuel our progress, rather than hinder it.
How do you use your time?
How do you try to be patient, despite your best efforts to rush the job?
Ten
steps over ten days are better than 1,000 steps in one day without any
follow up for a month. Going small has its advantages and you can build
it into something big.
But going big right out of the gate? It’s only a recipe for disaster and a guaranteed way to burnout.
I
used to think I should only write epic, long-form content. Stuff that
was at least a thousand words but preferably two to three thousand words
long. So I’d occasionally write, waiting for the spark of a bright idea
to take hold of me that was worthy of an ‘epic’ post.
It
didn’t take long for these huge expectations to become too much and
drive me into an oblivion of not creating a damn thing for weeks and
months to come. Which wasn’t good for anybody, especially my own
self-confidence.
My own vision of success had crippled me into a state of non-creation, a state of perpetual writer’s block; I was stuck in a fog of my own doubts, completely lost with nowhere to go but forward.
But
I didn’t want to move forward. I just wanted to stay right here, doing
what I always did… even though the spark was all but extinguished.
Block Out the Noise and Quiet Your Mind
Everyone has their own ideas of how you should best
do something. Whatever you’re doing, there are hundreds or thousands of
books on it, regardless of the size of your niche. Even with the
internet, there are blogs on every topic imaginable, either small, free
blogs or self-hosted personal blogs or posts right here on Medium.
The
problem is they often contradict each other because advice is a dime a
dozen these days. But being patient will never change. Patience is a
virtue, yes, but let me be clear — there’s a difference between patience
and hesitation. Between going for it and waiting it out.
Being
patient is accepting that great things take a long time to build. And
hesitation is looking down the hole of what you’d have to do to get to
where you want to be and stopping dead in your tracks. Patience is
accepting that creating your best work is going to take a while, and
living with that — not complaining about it and bemoaning your
situation, but just putting your head down and doing the work regardless
of the outcome it gives you.
If
you’re not patient and don’t give yourself fully to the work, you’ll
never get anywhere at all. And even if you do, you won’t be able to
sustain enough forward momentum to keep going every day. That’s part of
the reason why blogging almost every day is helpful because it forces me
to keep going no matter what.
Because no matter how good I thought yesterday’s piece was and how bad today’s is, I keep going. That’s all any of us can do.
Without
that persistent plodding forward, I’d be stuck. I’d never learn to be
patient with the process and accept the results as they come.
Despite
the cost it takes, unless you’re doing the necessary work to keep
yourself going every day, you’re only dooming yourself to fail and never
reach your dreams at all.
Remember
that, so when someone questions why you’re not where they think you
should be, you can safely ignore them. Because there is only doing the
work, and not doing it. And when you’re doing it, nothing else really
matters.
Weirdly
enough, when you consistently do the work over time, magic will start
to appear in your life. If you have the patience and the awareness to
see it, that alone will be enough to keep you going for the rest of your
life to come.
