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Success is Stamina: To Win Means to Keep Playing | Scott H Young
Rethinking Success
We liken success to sports, exams or battles that have winners and losers, and that have an end. However, success means having the stamina to keep going.
There might be many people who are more talented than you are. What will make you successful in starting a business, building a popular blog or writing a book is how long you can keep on trying.
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Rethinking Success
We liken success to sports, exams or battles that have winners and losers, and that have an end. However, success means having the stamina to keep going.
There might be many people who are more talented than you are. What will make you successful in starting a business, building a popular blog or writing a book is how long you can keep on trying.
Patience and Idleness
The kind of patience that leads to success is not the same as waiting. Waiting has no benefits. Investing time doesn't do anything on its own.
The kind of patience needed for success is an active, self-doubting kind of patience. It's putting in enormous amounts of work, reviewing the work, questioning if it was the right work, then making adjustments and trying again.
Build-Up and Breakthroughs
Success tends to accrue in two different modes:
- Build up: It is the steady accumulation of improvements that you can see month after month, that will eventually help you reach your destination.
- Breakthroughs: It requires a lot of effort with no visible benefits, but every once in a while, there's an insight that unlocks your potential.
Being patient
Stamina may increase the odds of success. However, life rarely involves a single pursuit. We are continually trading one activity against another. Those with greater endurance in one pursuit may miss a different one where success comes easier.
While there are many dead-ends and pitfalls, it is also clear that success requires stamina. One has to work on faith that everything will eventually pay off.
How to Increase Your Stamina
The key to long-distance running is pacing. If you're running faster than what your body can effectively sustain, you'll burn out. If you pick a speed just below that critical threshold, you can run for hours with the right mindset.
Set yourself up in a way so that sustaining effort for years is a viable option. It should include mental stamina.
Strategies for success
Dead-ends are everywhere, and many efforts go nowhere.
- Periodically ask yourself whether you genuinely have better opportunities than the one in front of you. Avoid the thinking that leads you to believe that the grass is always greener on the other side.
- Focus on the process of the pursuit itself, rather than the goal. The process should be tolerable, even exciting.
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Explaining inaction
Some possible but weak reasons why action is hard:
- Talent. But the world is full of brilliant stars that flame out and mediocre minds that build empires.
- Preferences can explain our failure to try, but don't explain our inner struggles with inaction.
- Capacity for effort. If your capacity for doing things is lower, it does not explain chronic bursts of activity with inevitable crashes in your goals and projects.
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Confidence
- Your motivation to complete a task depends on the value of the reward and your expectation of success.
- Your expectation of success depends on your motivation.
If your projects tend to fail, your expectations are low, and motivation fades. If your projects tend to succeed, your expectations go up, and motivation stays strong.
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Developing mastery
Fun is the experience of developing mastery. When we acquire new skills and recognize valuable patterns, our brains reward us with a shot of pleasurable sensations.
Games and learning
Games are optimal learning environments:
- Feedback loops are short, fast and adapted to your skill level.
- Challenges grow as you develop new skills.
- Failures are learning opportunities because every time you make a mistake, you get a hint about how you can do better next time.
Boredom and learning
Boredom is what we feel when our brain decides that there's nothing worth learning. It's the brain searching for new information.
And even games become boring at some point because they eventually run out of things to teach you. That's when you stop playing.
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