The (Un)rewarding Work of Success

Success in anything is, at least in part, how you define success for you. For one person, success may look like completing an Ironman triathlon in under 15 hours. For another, walking around a city block without struggling to breath may be marked as a success.

In the Western world, in particular, the media and financially successful people force-feed us the idea that success is defined by the type of car you drive, how big your house is, and how much money you have or debt you can service is.

And that’s easier, isn’t it? We can drink the Kool-Aid they’re pushing then excuse ourselves from finding success because we’ll never measure up anyway. We don’t have enough privilege, we don’t have enough time, we don’t have enough money, we have too many other responsibilities.

If you want something bad enough and are willing to work hard enough, you’ll find a way. I freely admit that our current system means the cards are definitely stacked far more against certain groups than others. While we’re individually and collectively working on that endemic problem, that means your timeline to accomplish something might be longer, perhaps even significantly so. Some things might seem impossible. . .until you start doing the work.

It may be that the payoff only comes after an extended period of long, hard, unrelenting, and unrewarding work.

It’s a hard thing, having faith in ourselves when we’ve never accomplished that thing before. Afterward, confirmation bias tells us we can do it again. The more experience we have, the more emboldened we become in other endeavors.

Before experiencing success and the potential increase in self-confidence that results, all we have is self-discipline to move us to do the work. Again, if the societal cards are stacked against you, it takes more small steps over a greatly prolonged path, to succeed.

We must also use caution in assigning a binary value to any endeavor: it is almost never a complete success or a complete failure and nothing in between. Each of the little steps along the way is an opportunity to learn something new. Any opportunity to learn should be regarded as a success in and of itself.

Perhaps the first thing you need to do is make a plan. This plan may consist of what my wife refers to as micro-habits: things that can be accomplished in 10 or 15 minutes a day. No matter how busy you are, all of us has 15 minutes (and probably more) of discretionary time.

Again, if you want something bad enough, you’ll figure out how to do it.

Just remember to be kind to and have patience for yourself in the process.

Thanks for reading!