Think of success as a marathon

Can you think of the reason they do it every moment of everyday? I’m talking about those seemingly more blessed few who are definitely much nicer, more agreeable, happier, healthier and certainly more successful than the rest of us?

They wake up every Monday to spend quiet time on their own, to exercise, read that stimulating book that fires up the winner in them, they eat healthy and are perfectly ready to productively engage with the world while the rest of us are still rolling in bed.

They are focused and are serial-achievers of whatever they set their minds to.

They give their service without expectation and receive much in return - from all corners. They do the same on Tuesday and Wednesday and by the weekend when we think they’re going to slack because that’s what we do over the weekends, they do it twice. Year in, year out, they maintain these nearly sacred rituals and ways of being.

They can be quite annoying these people, can’t they? Only that we admire them. We envy their ability to wave their “magic wands” and have every aspect of their lives simply fit perfectly to complete the jigsaws of their perfect existences.

You know these people. They have the mark on them and we all spot them from a mile away because they have a blinding halo of joy, good and abundance around them.

They are calm and self-assured, no matter what situation they find themselves in. Indeed, they know something the rest of us don’t. And if we know it too, it’s not quite enough because we must live it to earn the benefits.

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.

Any seasoned entrepreneur will tell you that if you’re going win — in any way, you must stick around and do the work and do it long enough.

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It is passion and perseverance for the long haul. “Doing the work...” for years. Not trying. Doing. I cannot belabour this enough because we all develop rust around our joints but this is not the rust that sabotages us. It is the rust in our minds that mostly works 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. We are not born with it because years ago, 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 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. Motivational speaker Les Brown put it very well: “It is not over until YOU win!”

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

The “shortcuts” that simply cut shirt the possibility of last replicable success 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.