Success is boring!

There is something that I have slowly started to realize as I have been mulling over the strange year that was 2020 and reflecting on the experiences and epiphanies I had in it. From as far back as I remember, I always heard of success being spoken of in heroic terms. I had heard several tales of success and people who achieved it right from when I was a kid and throughout my schooling. Success was always painted and presented in a grand and valiant manner. We have all heard them, tales of how someone overcame insurmountable obstacles, put in herculean effort and managed to come out on top and achieve success. Several blockbuster movies have been made that follow this widely popular theme. This gives us the impression that the road to success is thrilling and filled with adventure and struggle and then once they are overcome one arrives at the destination of success! In a movie, all this is packed into 2-3 hours and in books they are usually covered in around a few hundred pages. But in reality, there is hardly any drama or excitement in the journey of being successful at something. On the contrary, it consists of doing mundane, boring tasks and activities over and over again over several months or years. In the movies and tales of success, the protagonist has this burning desire and immense motivation to achieve what he sets out to do and this carries him through the entire ordeal until he manages to find success. However, in real life the road to success is so long (depending of course on what it is that you want to succeed at) that no amount of motivation is sufficient to carry us through the journey. Motivation is an emotion after all, and if we know one thing about emotions, it is that they change and that they change constantly! So there is no way on earth that we can rely on motivation to get us to do what is needed to be done one day after another over a long period of time.

Success entails doing tasks and repeating small positive actions even and especially when we do not feel motivated to do them! They say an amateur is one who does something when he feels motivated to do it and a professional is one who does it regardless of how he feels. This I feel exemplifies why the professional was able to become a professional whereas the amateur remains an amateur. One of the most frustrating parts of succeeding at something is the fact that when we put in the effort or take the action necessary to move towards our goal, nothing happens, we don’t get any positive feedback. Let’s take the example of getting fit. We go to the gym and get our first workout in and then we do it again in 2 days and then again and so on. Two weeks go by and we have had 6 sessions in the gym and then we look at ourselves in the mirror and we look exactly the same!! We have zero positive feedback and the motivation that was carrying us to the gym for the past 2 weeks dwindles and we stop going to the gym or think maybe the exercise regime is not working or that we are somehow different or we come up with some other rationalization to not continue. The problem with success is that when we take some positive action which would lead us down the path to success we do not get any immediate feedback. In fact, we do not get any feedback at all for quite some time and by the time we or someone else notices any positive change or improvement, the majority of the things that need to be done are already done. In the case of working out, results are only visible sometimes after 3 months of working out and eating healthy and avoiding all the junk food. So after 3 months maybe someone we know compliments us or comments about how we look slimmer or bulkier or that we look good. This is the first positive feedback we have ever received for all the work we have put in and it comes only after 90 days of going to the gym even when we feel like not going, avoiding that yummy looking burger and ordering the salad, walking past the rows of different varieties of chocolates stacked in the supermarket and buying the bananas and the apples instead, fighting that urge to eat something sweet after dinner and just having a glass of water instead. It’s only after 3 months of making these small trivial choices every day that we get even the slightest glimpse of positive feedback.

Moreover, these decisions seem very inconsequential in the present moment when we have to make them, but compounded over a long period of time these small trivial decisions are the very things that build success. It is the small positive actions that we take every day that are the building blocks of success but they don’t FEEL LIKE IT and so they are so damn hard to do and continue to do long enough till we see some positive changes. In one of the most influential books I have read and which in fact I am currently rereading titled “The Slight Edge” the author Jeff Olson while discussing this problem of not getting any immediate feedback for the positive actions we take suggests that we should not base our choices on the evidence of our eyes but on the basis of our philosophy and our faith that if we follow the process, the rewards will slowly but inevitably arrive. Another reason he states that achieving success is so hard is because all these small actions and trivial choices while easy to do are also EASY NOT TO DO. As in nothing happens if we eat a slice of pizza or a pastry instead of something healthy or watch reality TV for an hour instead of reading 25 pages of a good book, we do not immediately become fat nor would we immediately become fit or successful if we choose the better options so we get tricked into making the wrong choice. But these choices which seem inconsequential today added up over time make a whole world of difference. Also, the moment we make the wrong choice on any given day, we are that much more likely to repeat it sometime soon as we think back and realize that nothing overtly bad happened though we made that bad choice a few days ago and this cycle repeats.

Personally speaking I have struggled with this problem a lot, I have started tons of projects and enthusiastically engaged in them for a few weeks and then slacked off as my motivation and excitement waned. This is one of the things or rather the most important thing I have resolved to improve on in 2021. One of the commitments I have made to practise this principle of consistency and doing what needs to be done regardless of how I feel is to write on this blog. I have decided to write two articles on this blog every month of the year in 2021. As I started in December of 2020, this blog should have a minimum of 26 articles by the end of the year and more importantly there must be at least 2 articles that I write here every month until December 2021. The reason this is important is that in a spurt of motivation and enthusiasm I might end up writing more than 2 articles in some months in the beginning but the toughest part is to continue to write two articles every month over the course of this year regardless of what other commitments I have or the countless other things that are sure to happen over the course of a year. While I definitely want to improve the quality of the content and my writing skills, these are secondary objectives and my main goal is to just write even if I write badly. I am a firm believer in the quote that “anything worth doing is worth doing badly’! Until of course you get better, but paradoxically the only way to get better at something is to do it repeatedly. So on that note, I urge you guys to pick something, anything that you would like to start or improve on and set a target to do it consistently whether its daily, weekly or monthly and stick to it for a year. If nothing else, it will definitely improve our willpower and help us build the habit of consistency in whatever we do. So let’s get on and trudge along on this boring path to success!