Talking Yourself Out of Success

You are your worst enemy

Talking Yourself Out of Success
Photo by Ashwini Chaudhary(Monty) / Unsplash

You've been there, really close to success, then something in your brain goes "oh maybe I shouldn't do this, maybe this isn't my passion, maybe I should let this person win because of this or that, maybe I should change paths, maybe winning at this isn't that important anyways, maybe I'm gonna win even if I stop pushing so hard".

The secret to success is "Do the Things you said you were gonna do".

Finish things.

Forget smart techniques, forget "Work Smart, not Hard".

Forget tricks, forget great teachers, forget needing to be in the right school, the right neighborhood, the right country, the right time in history.

You are irrelevant today because you have been talking yourself out of success every step of the way.

People do it all the time; once you learn to see it, you will see it everywhere. The seeds of success are surprisingly democratized.

Time in the saddle. That's the biggest differentiator.

You won't become a radically better entrepreneur, programmer, guitar player, piano player, singer, writer, architect, engineer, whatever, if you spend only 1 hour of focused effort a day and compete against people working 10 hours a day.

You doom scroll, you play videogames, you spend more time answering slack messages vs going deep into problems and locking yourself into a room to focus, be bored, look at the wall for "rest", and then go back to deep problems.

That works for everything. There is no excuse. If you don't come from a starving country, a war-torn country, you don't have an illness that makes you unable to practice, you have no excuse.

The paradox is that many of the people from starving countries, war-torn countries, or have debilitating illnesses end up performing far more than people in comfy situations.

Post-traumatic growth can be a powerful motivating force. Upregulation in humans is kicked in when things are the worst they've ever been. If you are comfortable, introduce some willing stress into your situation, more than you think you are capable of sustaining.

It might unlock something in you.