Musings on committing and continually showing up to a place, a profession, or a person in an age of endless opportunities + persevering - even and especially when it's hard.
the teams best positioned to endure a bold journey are those in which the benefits from the sensation of progress outweigh the costs of working amidst uncertainty, anonymity, and anxiety.
if progress is a sufficient reward, you can be losing for a long time and still win.
"Young people run around searching for identity, but it isn’t handed out free anymore — not in this transient, rootless, pluralistic society. Your identity is what you’ve committed yourself to."
I meet a lot of people searching for something (career, relationship, etc). And yet, when it’s put in front of them, they won’t pursue it because they fear pain (getting hurt, failure, etc.). So they unconsciously (and expensively) trade self protection for misery.
The Effort Paradox
You have to put in more effort to make something appear effortless.
Effortless, elegant performances are often the result of a large volume of effortful, gritty practice.
Small things become big things. Simple is not simple.
This is what nobody tells you: commitment is an act of agency . We often get through life comforted by the thought that we have the ability to make choices, theoretically . But there's a peculiar magic that happens when you actually exercise that choice: the world shifts on its axis. You make active choices about how to use your time, energy, and... See more
The older I grow, the more convinced I become that commitment generates a kind of experiential wealth that can't be brute-forced into existence. There's this fascinating fractal effect that occurs, where constraint transmutes into focus, revealing layers of complexity a dabbler would miss entirely. It's not a limitation, because even that word... See more