Ordinary work creates incredible results
Great works are performed not by strength but perseverance.
Samuel Johnson
Worthwhile Pursuits are like the rock candy science project. For those who didn’t do this when they were younger, you can boil a sugar water solution, pour it into a jar, stick a string in the jar, and rock candy will crystalize on the string over the next few days.
Something is created from nothing, but it needs a particular environment to begin developing. None of the ingredients are remarkable, but when combined the right way, they create something incredible.
In practice, this rings true with any Worthwhile Pursuit, like our physical fitness. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about a 5-mile run, a good night’s sleep, or a well-intentioned meal, but over time, these create the environment for something incredible to begin developing.
The same is true in starting a business or excelling at work, or building deep relationships with the people we care about.
The only way for something remarkable to develop is to have all the right ingredients present in the right environment and wait for the magic to happen. There’s no way to accelerate crystallization for rock candy, and there are no shortcuts for Worthwhile Pursuits either.
Unfortunately, we only ever see the time-lapse version of Worthwhile Pursuits in other people’s lives. We see before and after photos, marathon finisher medals, engagements and weddings, business success stories, and folks living the life we want but can’t seem to get.
Seeing only the final product is very misleading. It makes us question why we don’t have the same results as we think all of the people around us do. All of the careful work we do to create the right environments, cultivate the right ingredients, and wait patiently feels useless if everyone around us seemingly has what we’re striving for without having to do any of the work.
Behind every final product we see is the equivalent of a sticky jar of sugar water sitting on the counter for days or weeks at a time. Whether others see it or not, we all have to toil through the same grind of behind-the-scenes work to create something to be proud of.
Everything remarkable, everything incredible, everything worthwhile, comes from a combination of carefully curated inputs, in the right environment, over a long period of time. The longer the time horizon, the larger the opportunity for compounding growth. Once we can find the right inputs, and the right environment, all we need to do is maintain our efforts and the mundane slowly transforms into something incredible.
Prompts
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What are the ingredients, environment, and time horizon required for something you’re currently pursuing?
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What does it feel like other people have done effortlessly?
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If you could only invest efforts in curating inputs, fine-tuning your environment, or developing more patience which would you focus on? Why?
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Very true! I've spent the last 5 years since starting my primary startup focused on putting in "consistent everyday actions" so that I could create a better environment for myself and thus my team.
As you said when we're focused on shiny end goals many times we don't consider the actual steps that will get us there (or we try to rush those steps and get mad when they don't work).
I recently wrote a step-by-step article on how to do holistic gamification in Notion/Coda/Airtable which will help people track their steps to their goals in a fun way on platforms they may be using already (also works for Sheets, Evernote, etc):
https://www.taskslayerz.com/task-management-with-gamification-the-ultimate-guide/
To respond to the prompts:
My secondary focus (besides keeping my main startup up and running) is to get Task Slayerz going as a community with content that helps people slay their daily tasks. The ingredients for this would be a marketing pipeline, an onboarding pipeline, and a creation pipeline. The environments are my main startup's team plus communities focused on professional productivity or goals. The time horizon is to launch next month so we can start building the community then do two more launches (Oct 2023 and Jan 2024)
Similar to you I research things before "deciding" if they were done "easily" or not and lot of times I find that people at some point put in a drastic amount of work. For me the thing I get "jealous of because it's easy" is writing blog posts. I feel like this should be easier for me because I love writing but for some reason I get super nervous when writing blogs XD
For the exact reason in 2 I recently got Adam Enfroy's Blog Growth Engine and I'm learning a ton about what I've been doing wrong. This information came at a price of $1,500 but considering I've been wanting to learn how to blog "correctly" for 4-5 years this was minimal to me as the training is definitely worth the price.
To answer 3 more directly I focus on my environment first. Input second. And patience 3rd. At this point in my life I want to use the energy I have while young to create an environment that improves my input and patience as I get older. In university I got really locked into the uni network but when I graduated I realized there was so much more so now I try to create physical, digital, mental, and spiritual environments that improve my ability to perform, manage, and lead.
I like how you're thinking about things! Thanks for sharing!