The are no guarantees in life. You might put in the work in a relationship but break up is still a possibility; you might go to the gym daily, and the biceps doesn’t show up according to your timeline; you might start a business venture, and you don’t get traction, you might train hard for a marathon, and you get a deep muscle pull in the race. Whenever you stretch yourself by aiming higher than you did in the past, the guarantees for success become lower as you strive to achieve your goals. Like in a marathon race, the farther you go, the lesser the applause from the crowd. When the going gets tough, you know your true strength; it is easy to get fired up when the applause is high from the world, but the real test is how you navigate the trying times.
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. – Martin Luther King, Jr.
As Martina McBride sang in her song “Do It Anyway.”
You can spend your whole life building
Something from nothin’
One storm can come and blow it all away
Build it anyway
You can chase a dream
That seems so out of reach
And you know it might not never come your way
Dream it anyway
In Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike, co-founder and chairman emeritus of Nike, Inc., Phil Knight, shared a great metaphor of how running imitates life as there are no guarantees. He writes:
The rewards are few and far from guaranteed. When you run around an oval track, or down an empty road, you have no real destination. At least, none that can fully justify the effort. The act itself becomes the destination. It’s not just that there’s no finish line; it’s that you define the finish line. Whatever pleasures or gains you derive from the act of running, you must find them within. It’s all in how you frame it, how you sell it to yourself. 1
“Every runner knows this. You run and run, mile after mile, and you never quite know why. You tell yourself that you’re running toward som
In Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter And How To Make The Most Of Them Now, Dr. Meg Jay observed:
The future isn’t written in the stars. There are no guarantees. So claim your adulthood. Be intentional. Get to work. Pick your family. Do the math. Make your own certainty. Don’t be defined by what you didn’t know or didn’t do. You are deciding your life right now. 2
If you focus on goals, you may hit goals—but that doesn’t guarantee growth. If you focus on growth, you will grow and always hit goals. – John C. Maxwell
In It Takes What It Takes: How to Think Neutrally and Gain Control of Your Life, mental conditioning coach to elite performers Trevor Moawad noted 3
To get promoted—it takes what it takes. Average people become average by doing average shit. It takes a specific set of behaviours (or lack of them) to be average. No one is born that way. People can behave themselves into mediocrity. They also can behave themselves out of it. The right set of behaviours doesn’t guarantee wins. Embracing pressure doesn’t either. This still isn’t about an outcome. It never will be. It’s about creating the opportunity to win by behaving like people who win. It’s about creating the opportunity to succeed by not ignoring pressure when you know it’s a necessary challenge that anyone who achieves must navigate. It’s hard. You accept that.
The right set of behaviours doesn’t guarantee wins. Embracing pressure doesn’t either.
Don’t devise a Five-Year Plan or a Great Leap Forward. Central planning didn’t work for Stalin or Mao, and it won’t work for an entrepreneur either. Slavishly follow a specific step-by-step strategy, the process gurus tell you. It’ll always work, they say. Not in my world. Predicting the future’s impossible. You work hard because it increases the odds. But there’s no guarantee; much is dependent on what cards happen to get dealt. I have always believed in playing as many hands as possible, as intelligently as I can, and taking the best of what comes my way. Every significant advance I or my company has ever made has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary: small earned steps—not big lucky hits. 4
Planning has its place; the actual thought process sometimes leads to great new ideas. But you can only accomplish what’s possible when you get there.
Meditations
- Daily Clam with Tamara Levitt – Magnification
- Mindfulness is a branch of meditation. Concentration is focused attention; we practice concentration by bringing our minds again and again to one tiny piece of our experience, like the breath.
- Mindfulness is the awareness that lets us notice our experience as it is without judgment or reactivity.
- The magnifying glass is no help if there is no sunlight to shine through it and the sunlight is too scattered to have much impact
If concentration is our magnifying glass, then mindfulness is the sunlight that shines through the glass.
- Daily Jay with Jay Shetty – Old New, New Old.
- A way to build something profound with recent friendships while keeping your long-standing ones long and fresh. With old friends, try to learn something new about them; instead of assuming you know everything about them.
Friendship is never established as an understood relation. It is a miracle which requires constant proofs. It is an exercise of the purest imagination and of the rarest faith! – Henry David Thoreau
Podcast
- Ep. 253: Making Time for What Matters (w/ Laura Vanderkam) – Deep Questions with Cal Newport
- Control your time by building timeout for your days and week ahead. Don’t say yes to something in six months; if you would be upset about doing it tomorrow, consider your ideal week and use that when making decisions.
All the best in your quest to get better. Don’t Settle: Live with Passion.
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