Started:     05-Jul-2023  |   Wed 07:45
Finished: 08-Jul-2023 | Sat 10:06
Read Time: 5 Minutes

Just like most everything I write about, this might not be 100% factual Truth, but it’s what I’ve learned.

My Golden Advice?

Just Keep Going.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Nothing else.

Just keep going.

This life thing keeps on going.
People keep going.
Time keeps going.
Whether we like it or not, we just keep going.

Once we know that, the rest is up to us.

Sometimes it sucks to just keep going. To keep moving forward with 0 indication of improvement? At times it feels like nothing’s happening. It’s like we try to run faster, but feel like we’re stuck on a treadmill.

No results.
No proof.
No progress.

Standstill.

No matter how hard we go.

Standstill. Change is so gradual and slow that we don’t even notice it. We barely notice the improvement.

But we have to just keep going.

We work out.
No results.

We try to learn a language.
No results.

We work on a project at work.
No results.

We project a side hustle at home.
No results.

Present

Progress is so slow that we don’t even notice it. That becomes awfully dissuading after some time. Particularly with projects that take lots and lots of time, progress feels impossible.

It feels like we’re not even moving. But we are.

And we have to just keep going.

We get impatient and want to ditch the project altogether. As humans, we have a terrible perception of time. Truly incredibly awful.

The Past is all rosy-colored, fictitiously painted with nostalgia.
The Future is infinitely far away, belonging to another lifetime.
The present is just some transit to a distant dream in the future. But it’s not real. It’s not tangible.

The present is so boring. It’s so… present.

We dream forever for a future reality, but once it’s here… wow, it’s already here. It becomes the present. Just another reality that we’ve already adapted to, lulled into normalcy.

Ever been more excited for Christmas Day than actually living Christmas Day? Or a vacation?

We want the highs. We want them now.

But to get there it requires patience. No large project comes from desire alone. It takes falling in love with the process. It requires us to love the present. It requires us to fall in love with the process, the habits, the work and not the end state.

And then we just keep going.

The Dream requires patience and time. And that’s the key variable – Time.

You just have to keep going, I guess.

Trust

Any progress we make is painstakingly slow. It feels like we’re not even moving. It feels like we’re blind children crawling through oceans of molasses. It’s how any goliath project, that’ll take months or even years to accomplish, feels.

Like we’re running in water. We want it here now, but it won’t be. We have to love the work, and the end result will come. The progress is impossibly slow. So if we love the progress, we love the Present.

It takes persistence, time, and usually a large chunk of blind faith. It requires us to believe in the nonexistent. It requires to construct our future from nothingness, strictly a belief. It’s not even certain that we’ll arrive at our end goal.

But I do know that if we stop moving forward, it will be certain that we won’t make it.

I’ve heard building our dreams described as building a bridge from an island that we’re stuck on. Most of us build half the bridge, can’t see the other side, and give up. Before too long we get bored and go build another bridge. After a while we end up with 50 half-built bridges and still no way to cross to the other side. We would’ve been better off to just keep going.

It took Einstein 10 years to theorize Relativity.

Anything worth anything is going to take time and a hell of a lot of blind faith.

There’s no other way around it.

Reflecting on the past and building the future. Looking backward is the only way we see the progress we’ve made. And then we have to go into the future blindly.

Understanding the past helps us understand and construct where we’ll go. We appreciate our accomplishments by looking backward. Sometimes it’s useful to stop and appreciate how far we’ve come to spur the motivation to keep going forward.

I have a poor habit of viewing myself at absolute 0, starting from scratch. “Great, now I’ve got to build from nothing”. I forget to reflect and appreciate what I’ve already done.

But think about how far you’ve already come. Think of what you’ve already accomplished. Be grateful. Thank yourself. Then think yourself into the future.

Visualize it. And if you don’t believe in yourself? In the words of my old coach:

“fake it, because that shit works”

Surgey R

It does.

Sheer belief. And love for the process.

Impatience.

I want to be there now. We’re dissatisfied with where we are right now. We want to be there already. “I know I can do better. I want to be better”

Now.

But that’s not how it works. You don’t get to teleport through the progress. You have to go through it. You have to progress. Nobody gets to bypass those struggles.

You have to suffer through the pain. You have to suffer the patience. And then you have to trust the process.

IF

If we’ve done our research, charted out a future, worked backward to identify what we need to get there and what we need to do every day… we’ll get there.

Life keeps coming. The incessant marching of time, it doesn’t stop.

So make the most of it.

We can choose to develop the good habits and watch our goals inevitably come to us, or we can be impatient, complain about how it’s not here yet, and give up any possibility of it becoming reality.

Trust.

It’ll happen.
If you’re following the process,
If you’re doing the right things
If you build up the habits…

It’ll happen.

You have to know it will with the entirety of your whole being.

And then you have to trust the process.

And you have to Just Keep Going.

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes – James Clear