Achievement is a lifelong marathon, not sprint race

There are people who have the ‘coveted’ mark. You can’t miss them. In fact, we all spot them from a mile away because they have a blinding halo of joy, good and abundance around them. They are cool, calm and self-assured, no matter what situation they find themselves in. They know something the rest of us don’t... And if we know it too, we evidently do not know enough of it or we would be exuding the same if not a higher level of confidence than these people.

These chosen few have understood that their best lives lie in living life as a marathon. They do no sprint anywhere. Sprinting does not describe their movements even on 100-metre endeavours.

Long haul

Any seasoned entrepreneur will tell you that if you are going win — in any way, you must stick around, do the work and tenaciously keep at it. It is passion and perseverance for the long haul. “Doing the work” for years.

Not trying. I cannot belabour this enough because we all, unfortunately, allow ourselves to develop rust around our joints but this is not the rust that sabotages us. It’s the rust in our minds that is wont to work against us.

We all know what the rust is and where it comes from. But of course, it is easier, more familiar and comfortable to claim that we don’t.

Well, we are not born with it because years ago when we were little, we weren’t rusty — neither in the joints nor our minds.

As we grew older and not necessarily wiser, the rust started to develop in all our joints and finally spread to our minds — the control tower of our every thought which becomes our feeling, translating into our actions and finally transmuting into the reality that we experience as our present lives.

It takes most of us several years, even decades of banging our heads against the wall, thinking, feeling and acting the same way over and over again receiving the same results to get us to realise that changes are required for different results to be experienced.

Success is as much about habit and tenacity as it is about smarts, talent and sometimes happenstance.

We cannot merely wish or hope good into our lives. We’ve got to acquire the requisite knowledge, put that knowledge into action and relentlessly keep at the action without yielding to distractions and weakness of heart until we receive our end goals.

Pearl of wisdom

The most encouraging part of this is that by accepting this deceptively simple pearl of wisdom, we can finally stop wasting our valuable time on those energy-guzzling sprints that we take across the fields of our lives.

The “short-cuts” that simply cut short the possibility of the replicable success that we are perfectly capable of creating. We don’t have to look for much else when we understand this.

If you haven’t won, keep going. Les Brown put it very succinctly: “It is not over until YOU win!”