Are you afraid of success?
Why are you procrastinating?
What is your laziness trying to tell you?
What are the things that you are lazy about?
I am always amazed by high performers, in sports and in the business world. I recently read an interesting article about Ronaldo. It was about how Ronaldo actually became faster and stronger during the first lockdowns of 2020. While many other players got sluggish, slower, and grew bellies over the lockdowns, Ronaldo increased the intensity of his work outs. He followed the training plan that was provided to him by his club, Juventus, as well as an additional 4 hours of his own training.
Why did other players use this time to finally take a much needed break from their daily routines while Ronaldo took this time to improve himself? Especially since he is already, debatably, the best and highly paid player in the world? What is he trying to prove?
Nothing
I believe he isn’t trying to prove anything. That’s the whole point. If you have things to prove, once you prove them, do you lose your motivation? How strong does your motivation have to be to enable you to train 4 hours longer than your teammates? Can that motivation last for years? Decades? Even after you’ve already achieved everything you ever dreamed of? How do you continue to motivate yourself past that? How do you justify putting in so much work?
We seek pleasure and avoid pain
I wrote another article where I talk about how being competitive is actually holding you back. Competition is a good short term motivator. It will give you short bursts of energy but over a long period of time, it causes you pain. What happens when we feel pain? We avoid it or we run away from it. Our brain is naturally wired to seek pleasure and avoid pain.
You can explain every action of every human being by categorising their actions in to “seeking pain” and/or “avoiding pain”.
Why do we go to work? To get pleasure from the things we want to buy and to avoid the pain of having no money.
Why do we order takeout? To get pleasure from trying out a new restaurant and to avoid the pain of washing the dishes.
Our actions are determined by which pain/pleasure is stronger. The pain of going to work is lower than the pain that we would experience if we did not go to work.
Also time plays a big role. The closer the pain/pleasure is, the stronger its impact. The immediate pleasure of drinking that sugary soda is stronger than the pleasure that you would receive by having a six pack in two years.
What if you could experience pleasure from what you do? What if doing something useful gave you as much pleasure as a sugary soda drink?
But they will judge me
When you are tied to the opinion of others, so is your pain/pleasure system. You gain pleasure when people like what you do and you feel pain when they criticize you.
In many cases, we might feel less pain by not doing something useful for ourselves than doing it.
For example, I want to write a book. Let’s examine the pain/pleasure factors of that (1–10).
How much pleasure would I receive from having that book written? 8
How painful would it be to me if I didn’t write the book at all? 4
How much pain would it cause me to write everyday for about 6 months to finish the book? 8
How much pleasure would I receive from actually writing the book for 6 months? 3
How painful would it be to me if the book was bad and everyone gave it a bad review? 9
How much pleasure would I receive if everyone loved my book? 8
As you can see, writing a book will bring me more pain than pleasure.
So what can I do if I still want to write a book? Well I could start by writing more and focusing on the practice of writing. Not for a reward, but for the art of writing. For myself. This will accomplish two things. First of all, it will make it easier for me write, making it more pleasurable. You have probably noticed this, when we become good at something, we start to like doing it. The second reason is that I will be detaching myself from the outcome. When you do something without an outcome in mind, you can actually focus on the practice.
Seth Godin talks about this in his book, “The Practice”, where he brings up an example of how he teaches people to juggle. He says the most effective way to teach someone is to teach them the proper throwing technique and to practice it. After you are able to get the hang of properly throwing the ball, the catching happens on its on. When you let go of the worry of catching the ball, you can focus on what matters. The metaphor is that we have a right to the action but not the outcome. The outcome takes care of itself.
Neil Strauss recently tweeted this:
“Better to have esteem than praise.
Better to have integrity than success.
Better to be balanced than have support.
Better to love than be loved.”
The thing that all the first qualities have in common is that it’s the only thing that you can control. You have the right to the action but not the outcome as Bhagavad Gita says.
Don’t mind your competition. If your competition is your motivation, how will you stay motivated when you are the best? How does Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett, and Ronaldo stay motivated? By looking within, not without.
Focus on the Action
The conclusion is that you should focus on your craft, your art. Don’t focus on the outcome, because you cannot control it. Don’t stress about the things that you cannot control.
Focusing on the outcome takes away our ability to enjoy our practice. In turn, this take away our ability to work hard because it gives us pain instead of pleasure. When do we work hard, we focus on the complete wrong things. Things that don’t align with our values and only take us further from the life we want to build.
So focus on the practice, as it is the only thing that matters. Everything else is just waves on top of the ocean.
“The practice is the outcome” — Seth Godin, The Practice.
