TL;DR
Clarity about what you really want and what it takes is important. Real ambition demands honesty about both desire and sacrifice.
It has never been my intention for this blog to be part autobiography. However, as time and experience have impressed on me the power of anecdote in communication, it has become inevitable for me to lump what could otherwise be ten pages (or more) of philosophising into short anecdotes from the many impressionable encounters I have had.
This one is about a Japanese man I met somewhere in the Great Lakes region of Africa. Although I only ever met him once, he left an indelible mark on my thinking about goals and hardwork.
I was halfway through with my Masters degree program, and I had taken some time off on a Wednesday morning to be at the gym. This Japanese man, whom I will call Nisho, happened to be at the gym at the same time. I was pushing myself to my limits when Nisho walked up to me and attempted to start a conversation.
“Nice shoulders, man”, he said, “Where do you get your steroids?”
I was the least offended as it was not the first time I was being asked a question like that. I had a friend who took immense delight in lecturing me on the downside of using steroids. He assumed, I imagine, that one way or the other, I must be cheating.
“I don’t use steroids”, I said with a smile.
Nisho couldn’t believe me. Yet as we spoke more about training routines and eating habits, his suspicion turned into admiration, and his tone became really friendly.
“Do you compete?”, he asked.
“No I don’t. There are no competitions in the country, and I’ve never really had the time.”
Nisho smiled, and without realising it, hit me with a line that has stuck with me years later.
“You can always start a competition if you want one. And time? Only people who don’t really want to do it don’t have the time.”
In several articles on this blog, I have written about my belief that for any truth to influence our behaviour, we need both a logical and a metaphysical experience; as rational and thinking beings we need to be convinced of its correctness, and at the same time as feeling and intuitive beings it has to leave an indelible mark on our psyche.
Banal as it was, my encounter with Nisho was my metaphysical awakening to the fact that I needed to be really honest about the things that I wanted and how much I wanted them.
I became even more convinced of the depth of truth in Nisho’s banal sentence when I learned of Phil (Buck) Knight’s work Ethic. In his bestselling memoir, Shoe Dog, he writes about the year 1968:
“I was putting in six days a week at Price Waterhouse, spending early mornings and late nights and all weekends and vacations at Blue Ribbon. No friends, no exercise, no social life - and wholly content. My life was out of balance, sure, but I didn’t care. In fact, I wanted even more imbalace. Or a different kind of imbalance. I wanted to dedicate every minute of every day to Blue Ribbon. I’d never been a multi-tasker, and I didn’t see any reason to start now. I wanted to be present, always. I wanted to focus constantly on the one task that really mattered.”
Nothing brings you closer to achieving your goals like 1) being absolutely certain that you want what you say you want, and 2) being upfront about what it will take. I could bet that an autopsy of all of humanities failures could be reduced to a deficiency of either or both of the aforementioned criteria.
It is increasingly hard to be clear on both criteria. For one, we are bombarded with excess positivity; it is quite fashionable to believe that we can have it all, now. It is also the case that the cultural war on complexity and nuance are reducing our ability to accurately determine what it will take.
And yet, if you’ll achieve anything that is meaningful, you’ll have to be very sure that you want to achieve it. There is no better guiding principle for making tradeoffs (whose inevitability economists have tried but have largely failed to impress on us), than being absolutely sure that you want the things that you say you want.
In this regard, I have found that sometimes it works best to first be sure about what you don’t want. My bet is that hatred and anger are more honest emotions than love and inclusion. When asked to list the things that we want, we tend to lie to ourselves; on the one hand, we feel and often internal guilt for not wanting certain things based on the situation, and we like to bloat our list in a bid to hedge our bets. However, when asked to list the things that we do not want, the truth of the matter comes to mind very forcefully. We may sometimes censor that list for social reasons, but it is often very clear to us what doesn’t make the cut.
As concerns taking proper stock of what it takes, I think the arguments for, as well as the methods are self-evident. I have heard often, people discourage taking proper stock on the basis that it can be demotivating.
It is true that it can be demotivating to take proper stock. It is only true, however, when one is not absolutely sure that they want the things that they say they want. When an existential threat makes the want of survival paramount, an inability to take adequate stock is suicidal, not demotivating.
A popular version of this counter argument emerges when very successful people say that if they knew what it will take, they would not have started. While that is how they feel, that is often not how they acted; as the need to succeed at their undertakings become more tangible and they grew in appreciation of the price they will need to pay, in most cases they rather became more committed.
What excuses are you giving yourself for not doing the things that you say you want to do? Could it be an indication that you don’t really want them as much as you do? And if you really want them as much as you do, have you taken stock?