Don’t Try to Force the Day of Success to Come Sooner
History shows that you can control the process, but you can’t control the outcome. So, don’t make the mistake of skipping steps and taking shortcuts to try to force the day of success to come sooner. Shortcutting the process is far more likely to delay success than to accelerate it.
One of my favorite authors Dan Millman has a great quote that I keep as a reminder to myself of this point. In his book Body Mind Mastery Milman writes the following:
We can foresee the direction of our progress, but we cannot foresee the pace. Life holds too many surprising twists and turns to accurately predict how much time our goals will take.
Progress is a function of both time and intensity. You can spend less time and more intensity, or more time and less intensity. If you overtrain, you may make more rapid progress and even enjoy a short period of glory, but you eventually suffer burnout.
When you focus on things you can control like the process, you become more resilient in your pursuit of success in the long run. When you focus on things you can’t control like the outcome, long run success becomes fragile and sometimes unrecognizable. You rationalize why it’s ok to sacrifice long run success for immediate gratification. Not only is this delusional, but it’s also a recipe for disaster.