cork bobbing in the water

The key to mastery and becoming a top producer, in essence, attracting extraordinary success is doing things that most of the people don’t like to do. They do high-value activities that the people who have embraced mediocrity don’t feel like doing — even when they too don’t feel like doing them. Highly successful people make it a habit to do these life-changing behaviors over and over again until their muscles of self-control and personal discipline grow stronger.

Most of us end up becoming like a cork bobbing in the water. We have no steady direction and as a result we end up going with the flow of the society. We start limiting ourselves because of our fears and insecurities. We start worrying about what other people will think and say about us and our work. We distance ourselves from patience, grit, and excellence and refrain from investing our time and energy in building self-control to do difficult but significant things that would catapult our success.

Because we don’t have any concrete plans, goals or direction, we end up following other people’s agendas most of the time; and other times, we simply do whatever we want to do. We sleep in, we get lazy, we procrastinate, we binge watch television, we escalate our screen time, we gossip, we play video games for hours, and thus end up dissipating our internal drive.

We do our work not because of our love for it, but simply because we need a paycheck. Instead of taking the right actions, we get seduced by the shiny accoutrements and deceptive treasures that society advertises to us, tempting us to take actions that don’t align with us.

Instead of focusing our time, energy and attention to create work that reflects excellence and creates meaningful impact, we rush towards completion of projects and deadlines. Instead of slowing down and expressing our genius, and disrupting our field with our extraordinary creations, we focus on gimmicks and marketing.

Our freedom lies in living a life enriched with discipline and self-mastery. A structured and focused approach will take us far to attract the success that we truly want.

We need to let go of superficiality and the constant rush, and instead slow down and do deep work. Only then we’ll able to produce a work of art that mirrors the extent of our genius and mastery, and creates a revolution in our field.