This is why you don’t need to give 100% in life to be successful
Have you ever felt guilty because you failed to give 100%. Did that affect your day? If you had such experience, then I have a very comforting story for you.
There is one story that made me realize something that I definitely encountered several times in my life but I never had the right words to explain.
This story is from the Tools of Titans, from Tim Ferriss, page 190 and the original author is Derek Sivers.
Derek used to live on this amazing beach in Santa Monica, next to this wonderful, 25-mile bike path. He would ride his bike up and down the path often and he would pace himself to do so. His typical ride would include a lot of stress because he wanted to beat his last time and with all that red face he somehow always managed to finish in exactly 43 minutes.
Over time, he was starting to feel less psyched about going out on the bike path. Because mentally, when he would think of it, it would look like a pain and hard work (unnecessary I assume). He then realized that it wasn’t cool for him to associate all this negative energy with going on the bike ride. And then he did the following.
He told himself that today he wouldn’t go as hard as usual and decided to bring the pace down and just try to enjoy the ride for a change. He found himself standing more on the bike than ever, looking at the blue ocean and really enjoying the ride in every possible way. He even had a pelican flying above him. He had a great time overall without worrying if he would finish the ride on time or not.
When he got back to his usual stopping place, he looked at his watch and get this; He noticed that the whole ride took 45 minutes. Wow. That moment changed the course of his life ever since.
He realized that all that huffing and red face was for lousy 2 minutes. It was basically for nothing.
In life, we try to maximize every moment we can, not realizing that sometimes it is not worth it. The reality is that you don’t need to stress about any of this stuff. Whenever you do something and it starts feeling painful, take a step back and reflect. Maybe the thing you are doing, which is clearly not the biggest priority in your life, isn’t something you should be working on as hard. Most of the time all you can do is to stop pushing so hard and get another perspective.
Get your priorities in order and take a break to enjoy life and celebrate your recent accomplishments. There is plenty of time left.
I am Adnan, a software engineer, a runner, a productivity hacker and more. My goal is to get all of us to move our bottoms and do something with our lives. I collect and process content on positive habits of the successful ones and try to curate in the simplest possible way there is.
Simple as that!
If you feel like clapping this article, I wont stop you. However, if you don’t feel like it, that’s fine too. It means I could have done better job with this. And that’s on me.
I wish you all a great day really and lots of love!
