27-Feb-2020
In the last post, the concept of make life less shite (MLLS) was introduced. In particular, you want to make your life less shite. At this point you are probably thinking, ‘Duh’. However, beyond the literal interpretation, there is actually a deeper meaning.
Stories of successes are many, one particular story came to mind is that of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s life/achievements. The story goes like this, one day he saw a body building magazine and decided that’s what he wanted to do, it set off the spark within him and the rest as they say is history.
He also realised that his native Austria was probably not going to be conductive of his success, so he emigrated to the US. In truth, he probably didn’t like his early life in Austria and happened to stumbled upon an idea (of bodybuilding) to help him to escape. Of which he held onto with both hands and never let go, never give up until he succeeded.
There are many angles to rationalise Schwarzenegger’s success. Perhaps he’s a product of his environment due to his childhood in Austria. Or maybe he got lucky by discovering bodybuilding, which turned out to be the IT thing for him. He was also fortunate to come across many people who helped him and guided him. Last but not least, the narrative of Schwarzenegger has always been that he worked bloody hard to reach his goals, reps upon reps, made every available time to train and further himself. It’s fair to say, a combination of many factors had led him to success. The core of his story is distilled down to, he wanted success for himself, then gotten an idea and worked his butt off.
It can be argued that everybody in the world wants success in their lives. It is sort of ingrained into the DNA. So wanting success is not the problem per se. So, the problem comes down to what (is success) and the how (am I going to achieve success).
For a lot of people, if you ask them their definition of success, you get a variety of vague concepts like success means being rich, or famous etc. However, if pressed for more details, they actually can’t tell you more because unlike Arnold, they have not gotten the idea of ‘what’, let alone the ‘how’.
The painful realisation is, to be successful, at the very least, you need to know what you want. You need to be very clear in precise terms, so that you have something solid to aim for, a structure to work with and a hope & desire to get there, teamed with some actual work.
So if you don’t know what you want, what else can be done besides endless searching? The answer is to MLLS! It serves as a precursor or enabler for you to let go and have the capacity to embrace opportunities. For example, loosing those few extra pounds might give you the confidence (and speed) to catch up to that hot guy/girl you are wanted to say hi to during your morning runs. Or say you charmed a potential partner into visiting your place and they didn’t run to the door as your place has just been cleaned. The point is, preparation will improve your chances of success.
The moral of the story is, if you are not aiming for greatness right now, then at least allow yourself to move up from the bottom, it does shorten the distance to reach greatness, even if it is a few cms/inches at a time.
Struggle Perpetual 