Your actions today don’t look anything like your success tomorrow
Success is easy to imagine. We can see the riches, the adulation and even the happiness we might feel, in high-definition. Since such daydreams seem so effortless, it is often a rude shock to realise how difficult it is in reality to achieve anything worthwhile.
The most unsettling realisation for many people is that our actions in the present don’t look anything like the outcome we’re after. The thing about success is that countless actions we undertake in the present will, with some luck, come together at some point in the future to create a successful outcome. But till that happens, there is no saying whether your actions are contributing to your eventual and hoped-for success.
Success, in other words, is an emergent property. Keep at it for long enough, and with some luck something resembling your image of success might appear. This is a point that most people miss.
What makes matters worse is that stories about other successful people hide more than they reveal. The easily spotted indicators of success make it extremely difficult for us to realise what it took for the successful to become so. Everybody hails Elon Musk as this once-in-a-generation genius, and rightly so. But not everyone knows how bloody hard he worked for his success. As he himself put it:
‘Starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.’
The underlying truth is that you can’t recreate your desired future state in the present. If you want to play the guitar like Eddie Van Halen, your practice routines will not sound as epic as Eruption. That’s why there’s an element of faith involved in any pursuit. You have to trust the process and hope for the best.
Elon Musk did not set out to become one of the world’s richest men. His motivation was far deeper: to solve some of humanity’s most pressing problems. That he was successful beyond his imagination is only a side effect of his obsession. The lesson for us lesser mortals is that if something is meaningful to us, we must be willing to do it fully aware of the fact that success might not come in the form we envisioned. In fact, it might not come at all.
Goals are a helpful reminder of the general direction we must move in, but what matters is the thing that must be done right now. That thing might not look anything like the glory you have envisioned, but it’s the most important step towards it.
