I have been having conversations with a few people over the past couple of weeks, and a specific theme has emerged. In almost all the conversations, there was a clear convergence towards a specific concept! This concept is rooted in “process vs results”. I’m going to try to keep this short, but hey ... I’m not making any promises!
I also want to highlight that this concept has emerged in the free academic support sessions we’ve been hosting. This is interesting because a lot of the people that join these sessions are young students in high school, and they come from different backgrounds.
The concept is this:
A lot of us want results but we don’t want to be part of the process.
We want the fruits, but we’re not even interested in finding out how the fruit-bearing tree grows.
And what I’ve seen is that this hinders progress. We get delayed because every now and then, life places a demand on us that requires the understanding of the process and not necessarily the results of the process. Every now and then, life asks this simple question, how? And we fail to answer because we never interested in the how, we just wanted the what!
This was further highlighted by this quote which literally wrecked my mind.
Most people misunderstand the concept of being tested by fire. They fail to realise that a test of fire simply burns everything away and says to you “do it again”, and if you don’t know how, you fail. The fire doesn’t just burn the impurities, sometimes the fire burns everything and you’re required to build it again.
You just felt your brain explode right? Welcome to the club! This statement wrecked me! The audacity, the liver, the chest ... to say such!
But anyway, this is what I realised and would like to share with you and ask that you think about it for a while. Let it be some real food for thought!
The fact that you are here is important, and impressive! But how you got here matters more than the fact that you are here!
The process is important! Because results fade, W’s turn into L’s, life happens! And if you don’t know how, you will struggle to recover!
Some of us need to look at this from a different perspective. Some of us are not suffering from the “test of fire”. We are suffering because of our “addiction” to the end goal.
We have an idea, we know what we want it to look like in the end, we are even fortunate enough to get help, but our addiction to the end goal has caused us to miss the process. We are where we want to be, but to remain there, we are at the mercy of those who “helped” us. Not because they are holding us hostage, but because we never insisted on being part of the process.
Your podcast is up and running, but you’ve never actually edited and uploaded an episode before, and this week your regular “tech” guy is busy ... and you’re stuck. You have the what, but you don’t know the how.
How you got here matters!
This us the thought I want to leave you with this week:
Be part of the process!
Be part of the process because how you got the results matters just as much, if not more than the results themselves.
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