#22 Sprinting & Taking shortcuts
“It took me 10 years to succeed…, overnight.”
I love this quote that I encountered in a lost magazine at a bus station.
It reminds me of 2 common illusions most achievers fall into at one point or another:
1/The sprint does not exist.
The sprint doesn’t exist for one simple reason; What you desire the most, not an intermediate goal but your true ambition, your real quest, is an infinite game that will never be done once and for all.
You tend to it, you take it step-by-step, you expand and get bigger and better on your path, but still your journey is infinite.
The pursuit of it IS the matter.
Think a moment, when you become number 1 in your field, you discover that the game is still not over: You become your own challenger and compete with yourself to be better than you were yesterday - MJ-style.
The untold truth is that since the very beginning, you were and you are your own unique challenger. Most of the time you only realize it fully when you have finally beaten the very last one of your visible competitors. There, you look around and understand it all. The game is not yet over, and it never will be.
Let me clear something up here: When I say that sprinting doesn’t exist I don’t mean that you cannot go faster. Don’t confuse the distance and the speed. Know that you’ll have to run FOREVER, and thus manage your speed and take care of your mental and physical condition in order to stay endurant and unstoppable. I guess that’s why they call it the long run.
2/Shortcuts do not exist.
We all love shortcuts, right?
I mean, we love to distinguish ourselves from the others (#loooooooosers).
We are also thrilled to figure out a way to get results sooner than expected.
The shortcut is sexy. The shortcut is truly appealing. I get it.
However, we are not talking here about cutting in line at the grocery store. When you are moved by your true mission/quest (what you really want the most from this life), then looking for a shortcut in this perspective IS a dangerous slope.
Why? Here are 3 issues I’ve noticed when I look at some clients and friends who have surrendered to this siren’s call:
- They may have saved a small amount of precious time, but then they usually run into some kind of obstacle that slows them down, and hard. They eventually make mistakes that cost them a lot more (the same principle as yoyo diets.)
The reason is that they may have felt they were going faster, when in reality they were achieving NO inward growth (self-management, mindset, emotional-situational-positive Intelligence, wisdom, problem-solving experience, etc.)
- Consequently, they stress more when the going gets tough – when you take an opportunistic shortcut, you might feel, later down the line, like you were “taking a high-school exam as 6 years old” (client’s quote).
Again, back to issue #1: they haven’t built their muscles in the meantime. Because, well, there was no “meantime”. - They risk looking like an amateur. Experts recognize experts; They spot amateurs from a mile away.
Are faster results what you really should focus on?