Making success inevitable
Like a train, continue in one direction until you reach your destination. (Image by WikiImages)
A friend is in quarantine for COVID-19.
Her husband tested positive, so her family has to be isolated not only from the world, but also from her husband.
The circumstances are difficult. She’s not sure how she’s going to make it to the end. But if she keeps moving through her days, hour by hour, she will eventually come out the other side.
Meanwhile, another friend spent years wanting to write a book. After not getting very far on her own, she joined a program designed to help her. Following their process, she has now completed a manuscript.
It can be difficult to imagine how we’re going to overcome a challenge, especially when we don’t already have the tools to do it. Long-term projects are hard to stick with, since we can’t readily see the payoff for our effort. To succeed, we have to trust the process and any guidance we are receiving.
If we want to measure our progress along the way, we can pay attention to leading indicators — the actions we have control over that will ultimately determine our success. This often boils down to a daily or weekly commitment. For example, if I’m training for a marathon, I can’t just run farther and faster every day. A good training program will have rest days and shorter runs built into it. Despite this, I can feel a sense of momentum simply by focusing on the plan. That is, if I’m following the plan — and I get back to the plan each time I have a lapse — I am making progress.
Likewise, if I want to learn to play the flute, I can seek to play the flute every day. It may sound terrible and feel awful and I might not be able to hear a difference. But instead of focusing on the subtleties — is it a little less terrible than yesterday? — I can look at the broad strokes. Did I play today or not? It’s simple.
Some days, it won’t feel as though enough is happening. Time crawls, and the 500 words we’ve committed to writing each day don’t seem like they will be sufficient. Where is the book, already? But our perception isn’t always reality. We’ve divided an inconceivable task into manageable portions — all we have to do is keep coming back.
True, just writing 500 words a day for six months won’t necessarily yield a book. The daily tasks need to be connected to a clear intention and, ideally, a plan. But we don’t have to know the exact plan at the start. It can be part of the process to figure out the plan and find the needed resources, including teachers, coaches, and other mentors.
I’ve got a project on my plate that I’ve had in mind for many years. I never had a clear plan, but that isn’t the reason that this project remains incomplete. No, I lacked consistent effort and had no leading indicators to keep me on track. I worked on this project when I was inspired, and then stopped.
These days, I’m lucky enough to have a champion for this project. It’s like in a movie where the old, ornery artist reluctantly gets new inspiration from a young disciple. But that isn’t enough — I have to make a commitment. If I do, the work will get done and we will reach our goal.
Day by day, meal by meal, and snack by snack, my friend and her family will make it out of quarantine. It’s inevitable that the time will pass. For those of us who have a more specific outcome in mind than simply growing older, we have some stuff to do while the time is going by. But if we follow through, our success will be just as inevitable.
