Confession: I’ve been feeling super impatient lately with how long it’s taking to hit some of my big goals in life. Nothing seems to be coming to fruition as fast as I want it to. Can you relate?
Most of us have goals. Whether it be personal, professional, financial, relational, athletic, or something else most of us have an idea of where we want to be and what it might take to get there.
But when the going gets tough, it can be hard to recall that goal with sufficient force! I often want abs of steel but when it’s 8:00 at night and Eva and I are on the couch watching Netflix I want about 8 cookies way more than that six pack. As a matter of fact, in that moment, I usually don’t give a damn about abs.
Achievement of our goals feels great. Some of the goals I remember hitting that left an impression on me were: paying off our house, running my first ultra-marathon, then the 2nd, racing the mountain bike in 100 mile races, climbing 5.11 outdoors, 20 years of being with Eva.
All of those goals felt good to nail, but there was literally YEARS of work that came before the culmination. And for every single one of the achievements listed above, I worked my ass off for each one of them.
It reminds me of this quote from Danish born, American journalist Jacob Riis…
“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter
hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as
much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first
blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last
blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”
My hunch is that for short-term goals you don’t have to love the work. You can tough it out for a brief period of time. But for long-term goals, or achieving mastery at something, you’re gonna be in the thick of it for a while, so you better either like it or learn to like it.
Dr. Sarah Lewis, a Harvard professor, author, lecturer and expert on the topic of mastery defines success as an event, but says that mastery is a continuous pursuit, a journey.
Good News/Bad News: If your goal is truly meaningful, then you GET to do the thing you love (or are at least interested in) for a long ass time. So choose your goals wisely. If you’ve chosen big money as your goal and you’ve chosen a job you don’t love to get there, then you are in for a long and rough ride. Buckle in.
But if you’ve chosen a goal that is aligned with who you are at your core, then the work it takes to get there won’t be so bad. Yes, there will be shitty days, but for the most part, you’ll learn to love the grind.
In the 12-step world we use the term “trudging the road of happy destiny” to describe a lifetime of sobriety and service to others. The first time I read that line, I was not at all interested in living a life like that. But then I looked up what that meant. Merriam-Webster defines trudging as: to walk or march steadily and usually laboriously.
Yep. That’s what achieving goals and working towards mastery look like. Yes, I have moments all the time when I want the hack, the Cliff Notes, the TLDR because I’m impatient or tired or have taken too much on. But it’s the 99 hammer strikes that get me where I want to be.
I have goals in so many areas of my life. I want to see another 20 years of marriage with Eva, I want to build a financial nest egg that makes things feel easy and secure, I want to be able to climb and ride and hike without pain well into my 80’s, and I want to publish my novel. Maybe several novels.
The good news is that I love my wife and am willing to do the work to be in a healthy relationship. I enjoy my work so making that money will come over time. I love staying active and writing stories so those things will continue to come to fruition for me.
So stop wasting time and energy looking for the short cut and settle into the journey of mastery and learn to love the work. And if you don’t love the work, maybe it’s time to reassess the means to your end!
“The Olympics are an amazing pinnacle of what sport is, and it’s fun to be on that stage, but the other 99.9% of the time, you’re not on that stage. And so it has to be about something more than that—if all you really cared about was that .01% of what your career entailed, you’d be missing out on your entire life. If you define yourself or your career by that .01%, that’s really unfortunate.”
-Aaron Peirsol, Olympic Gold Medalist