No one sees you when you’re trying and why it shouldn’t matter
Before you reach your target end-goal or achieve the definition of success that you’re looking for — you’re in the phase of making it all happen.
I like to call it the “action” phase.
I have come up with my own little acronym for my this phase in the projects I set whether they be personal, or work related.
Always
Creating
Timely
Initiatives
Over
Nonsense
This is where you’re trying, doing, learning, falling, getting back up again, creating, encountering and overcoming obstacles, setbacks, and ultimately: persevering through it all.
So, you might be asking what the nonsense part of my acronym means.
NONSENSE = NO BULLSHITTING.
There’s no easy way to success.
The idea that success should be easy is plain nonsense. This is why this is an important part to my acronym.
ACTION means if you’re out to achieve something, you’re going to try your hardest, and even if you fail, you’re going to find a way to make it work.
To be successful, you don’t have to meet your goal the first time around. You just have to have a plan in ACTION, even if you fail. You will want to set time boxes for each short term goal, create initiatives, redefine your goals, until you reach that end-goal which brings you success.
Like in project management environments, you have a main objective to complete. During that time, you’re gathering everything you need to be successful. You lay out plans, set deadlines, create initiatives along the way that further your pursuit for your own success, until you reach that finish line.
Then you get to the point where you’re shouting from the top of the mountain:
I MADE IT!
I FINALLY DID IT!
ITS HERE!
ALL MY HARD WORK PAID OFF!
If you’ve achieved success on any level, those exclamations can sound familiar.
My story here isn’t about what happens once you’re successful. It’s about the huge mess in the middle: ACTION.
The truth is, people don’t look at you when you’re actively doing something towards your goal of success. They don’t seem to care that you’re “trying” to get there.
People seem to only care when you make a mistake, have failed attempts, or when you finally succeed.
All the stuff in the middle doesn’t seem to matter or impact anyone, but it doesn’t have to.
The middle doesn’t matter to the outsiders looking in, it should only matter to you. It’s your actions that bring success to you through your ACTION plan.
Success isn’t linear. It takes time. It takes making mistakes. It takes learning. It takes reminding yourself of what you are out to ultimately achieve for yourself.
When I climbed a mountain in 2016, I had a goal in mind.
I told myself:
“I’m going to climb a mountain.”
I knew then I wasn’t going to climb just any mountain. I had to think about location, travel, accessibility, skill level, cost of trip, etc.
At this point, I had to bring the known variables into the picture and make my goal less vague.
So, I made a decision in February of 2016 with my cousin that I wanted to travel to Canada to Vancouver, British Columbia to climb Grouse Mountain.
I didn’t know how I was going to get there, but I knew at the time I had a goal, and I would make sure it was in my power to achieve it. I didn’t have a detailed plan from the beginning when I first said that I was going to climb a mountain, but I gathered all the items I needed to be successful.
From that point, the ACTION began. I started looking up flights, looking up hotels, renewing our passports, getting Canadian currency — these small things had nothing to do with my main goal of climbing Grouse Mountain, but they were part of getting to that main objective. Those were all the short term things I needed to keep checking off to make my plan successful long term.
The items that affected my direct objective were how I was going to train, what I was going to eat, how I was going to build muscle, how I was going to stay positive when the terrain got rough, ensuring I had the right shoes, snacks, and water to make it up the climb — all of my ACTIONs. No nonsense in any of it.
My benchmarks for success were as follows:
Train
Create Diet Plan
Get hiking shoes
Get a backpack with easy water accessibility.
I made sure I focused on those goals. The most important part was training and getting my diet together for my physical health.
Yet, from telling you this part of my story, no one really cared when I was in this process of planning out my short term goals.
No one really cared when I was looking at the environment and planning out how we were going to get there and where we were staying, etc.
No one paid attention to me climbing up 19 flights of stairs everyday at my job at the time as part of my training regimen.
No one paid attention to the meals I ate that helped me get stronger.
No one saw me miserable when I woke up in the morning on my commute to the gym to keep my routine.
Yet, EVERYONE saw me reach my goal, but had no idea what was involved in reaching that goal.
They also witnessed my greatest setback in March when I began my training. I had my “lessons learned” from that day.
People saw me get deathly ill from being on a strict diet/exercise plan. I was eating 1,000 to 1,200 calories, sleeping 3 hours a night and working out twice a day. I was losing a lot of weight, but I wasn’t helping my body with the lack of sleep.
On one of my commute homes on the train, I started feeling fatigue. It felt strange. At the time, I was so focused on being a beast by my target date of July 29th, that I didn’t care if I hurt myself to get my goal. I was blind-sighted by being this perfect superhuman.
On March 28th, I ended up in the hospital with Chickenpox. Odd huh? All that from working out too much, starving myself, and not getting enough sleep?
The doctors thought it was due to my immune system being weakened from how I was taking care of myself that I contracted this illness from my commute or being in an office with someone carrying the virus. I was a fully vaccinated child and the doctors did say that vaccination is not 100% guarantee that I will not get that virus as an adult. It’s just a very rare chance.
I welcomed this rare chance with open arms to realize how much I desperately wanted to live.
I almost died.
This felt like the end of the world to me when I kept looking at my end goal.
How was I going to still climb a mountain with only two months to train efficiently? Is this still possible?
Long story short, I spent a whole month in recovery. After three weeks, I was no longer contagious and could go back to work and slowly introduce working out again.
I was so upset that I was so focused on my end goal that I forgot about all my goals in between.
After being sick, I realized the most important thing was taking care of myself and my health. I had to prioritize sleep. I had to switch my workout routine to start going once a day vs twice. I added more calories to my diet on workout days to fuel my body.
This is the success I learned from my failure the first attempt in my training.
Yet, despite me almost dying, I rose above and learned, and had to shift priorities to still be a beast on the terrain and still be healthy and nourished for the day I climbed Grouse Mountain.
So, did it matter that no one really saw the entire journey?
Not really.
This journey was for me to enjoy.
I succeeded. I climbed Grouse Mountain in 2 hours and 30 minutes and couldn’t have been more proud of everything that brought me to that moment.
While people don’t always notice the efforts you make to get to your goal — don’t let it deter you.
If you want something, go achieve it.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a detailed plan from the beginning. You can plan along the way as you get all the details you need to get to your end goal.
People might focus when you fail or slip up, but that shouldn’t matter.
What matters is that you’re in this for you, and YOU define your own success.
If you create your ACTION — you will reach your goal.
