Stream2

For the first chapter of my adult life, I.e. the beginning of my young adult life, I believed that the effort most likely to succeed was to try my hardest. Throughout university and for my first year after graduating, during which I took a gap year, I constantly resolved to take on new projects. I would hatch ideas and plans on a week to week basis – essentially every time I felt motivated, which typically was either due to stumbling upon some new idea or just the regular ebb and flow of energy.

The problem with this style of work for me is that I never was able to fully follow through on projects. Like Yoda says in Star Wars: do or do not, there is no try. My whole ambition was rooted in trying and it simply wasn’t working out for me.

However in parallel to ambitious and never resolved work projects, I was also avidly reading philosophy. I kept stumbling upon ideas like “spend all of your time thinking” – Aristotle. Or “pay attention to the breath in every moment” – Yogic philosophy.

These ideas struck me as a different paradigm than putting in maximal effort, because if I had to spend every moment thinking or following the breath, this means that I would also have to do these things when I had no more gas left in the tank. When I would typically retreat to habits like playing video games or playing music, these philosophies didn’t allow for. There was no retreat in “spend all of your time thinking”.

So I decided to follow the advice of the philosophers. It wasn’t conscious at first, I just caught myself trying to spend every moment focusing on one thing or another, but I noticed that I was enjoying these moments. Despite the fact that they weren’t explicitly productive, they felt like I was making some sort of intangible progress.

So I kept doing it.

It was in this resolve that I experienced a paradigm shift. Instead of thinking to myself “I will try and hopefully succeed, but if I fail I will try again”, I started thinking “I know the way, and I will do this for the rest of my life”.

I’m not going to comment on which mentality is better for success, because honestly, I don’t know. However I will say, the latter way of thinking is far more conducive to happiness. I also noticed that it was possible to build something with the latter mentality. In being committed to a way of being, rather than what I was doing, I found the foundation I needed to progress. Maybe not linearly, but steadily. Sometimes it is one step backwards to take two steps forwards, but the foundation never disappears once it has been solidified.