“Pursue excellence, and success will follow, pants down!”
I often glorify superficial metrics of success and in the process, prevent myself from actually putting in the work or pursuing what I believe in. It’s a habit I am not proud of.
I’ve often told myself that I want to be like that guy or I would go on the Forbes list and that I want to do what she does… and I eventually realized that that was a really dangerous way of thinking because I would associate success with this small or I guess very big material goal and I would forget the process by which we should accomplish them.
I forgot to appreciate the hours and the hours of work that went into accomplishing even the smallest of goals and so today I want to articulate this notion of pursuing excellence and letting success follow you and not the other way around. In many subcultures around the world, especially the Indian and the Asian ones, the dominant mentality is to study as much as you can memorize every fact and figure along with a bunch of random information that may help you sacrifice understanding for just climbing up the ladder so that one day you can get a great job and be successful, and the reason I think that’s a really dangerous mentality to have is that more often than not that’s not what we want for ourselves.
Many people want to be artists or writers or creators or engineers but in different industries I think that that mentality is really troubling for no reason other than the fact that we’re living our whole lives by someone else’s conception of success but we lack the excellence and the passion in whatever we’re doing to achieve it - because it’s not what we want to do. We can go our entire life thinking that it’s okay as long as someone else thinks that we are successful but it doesn’t matter if we do. Say someone really important and influential tells you that you should pursue a career in writing and say that person also happens to be really rich so they hire a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer to help you out and tutor you on the weekends. I guarantee that if that’s not what you want to do deep inside of yourself then you aren’t going to be a good writer because you aren’t gonna spend the hours every single day reading books and equally as many hours writing every single day and so it doesn’t matter if Hemingway or Shakespeare is teaching you how to write because deep down you aren’t pursuing the excellent behavior that is necessary to achieve such a feat.
When we have these people around us that may not have any particular goals or ambitions or passions look to the people that they admire. Everyone wants to be like someone who’s successful: the athlete, the influencer, the business person… but have you noticed that those people are always so lively and passionate when they talk about what they’re doing and that’s the key difference; we want to be like them but we aren’t willing to confront the fact that we need to be just as excellent in whatever we do and we need to be willing to put in the work when no one else is watching. In my case I kind of fell into this foolish trap.
Don’t expect to be successful or good at something unless
- you deeply believe in it
- you’re willing to put in the work that’s necessary every single day towards achieving your goal.
Don’t ask yourself what the world needs and then superficially try and prune your activities to just fit the mould, find what makes you come alive and put the work in. The overnight success that you’ve seen your favorite people like influencers and athletes and business people is not overnight - it is the fruit of thousands of hours of labour of the process of committing oneself to an activity or to an idea and making excellence a habit. Once you pursue excellence and make sure that every day you’re putting in the work and when you’re about to go to bed you believe that you could not have tried any harder because when you do that then greatness and being at the top and being successful can’t help but it be inevitable. I know that might be overly optimistic but I think that’s a hell of a lot better of a mentality to have than just to say hey I want to be like that guy or I want to do what she does and I’m gonna get there but I don’t know how it’s gonna happen.
The quote is from 3 Idiots (as is the gif), I highly recommend this movie (you’ll need subtitles if you aren’t a native Hindi speaker)
Discussion, links, and tweets
I'm a maker/writer. I like to overwhelm with periphrasis and to underwhelm with my seemingly subtle humour. Opiniated is an understatement.
Tweet Follow @i_am_aust_n