One thing a lot of athletes overlook is the power of staying consistent in your effort over the long run. You can be a successful athlete without understanding and master this concept. Great athletes know how to stay long-term focused. The long-term focus you working on the things that matter. When you have a short-term focus, you get caught in obstacles that won’t matter tomorrow.
A lot of people focus in on putting on a lot of effort instead of putting in one that is consistent over long-run. One gets you out of the gate looking good; the other gets you to the finish line. We only have so much energy to give and contrary to how super you feel; you have to use that energy wisely. We are told a famous fable that teaches us this lesson.
Be the Tortoise
The Tortoise and The Hare is a perfect example of this. In life, you can be the tortoise and get out of the gate quickly or you can be the hare. You have to actually think about this one. The Tortoise got out quickly and the story is told as if the Tortoise was cocky and lazy. The reality is that the Tortoise cannot maintain that pace.
Approach life like a marathon, not a 100m dash. If you get out of the gate on your projects like a 100m runner, you’re not going to make it to mile 26. The energy distribution is not possible.
Chasing any endeavor is the same way. Getting a scholarship is not something you put all your effort into your last year of high school. The best way to get a scholarship is to start in middle school. It gives you more time and years to spread out your effort. It allows you to be more like the tortoise. You can have missteps when you are the tortoise but because you are moving slower the crash is not as bad. You can still get up and keep going because the race you are running is much longer.
Don’t Over Do It
The tendency many athletes have is to try and kill it for a concise period. You think you can make up for bad by over doing it. For example, if you go out on the weekend and drink you think that drinking a tonne of water will cancel out the alcohol. Or say you get injured, you assume that after you come back, you have to train harder than ever to make up for lost time.
Adopt the tortoise mindset and just choose an effort you are going to stick with. Find your pace and lock that in for the good times and the bad times. When an army marches a long way they do it by locking in on a consistent effort no matter the weather. What this means is that on the bad days you will have the energy to keep going, and the good days you call it quits early so you can last.
What people try and do instead is go far on the good days, so they burn out and have nothing to give to the bad ones. You need to stay consistent because there is always a rainstorm around the corner you need to get through.
Good and Bad Times Never Last
Whether you are going through some awesome times, or you see the wors of the worst of times, they don’t last. When good happens, we get too excited about thinking it will last forever. When bad happens we get down thinking it will last forever.
Times always pass us by and when they do pass us by we need to be ready for what is coming next. There is nothing wrong with being excited or being down but keep it temporary. The time will pass so you have to keep plugging forward.
A big way to help with this is to keep good friends around you. When you have true friends close by, they make sure you never get too high or too down on yourself. That is key in life because neither end of the spectrum is good for you in the long run. You want to get excited but not so high on yourself that you feel unstoppable.
Be The Sculptor Not the Demolisher
A sculptor and a demolisher are similar because they both are destroying and removing things. It happens to be one does it with patience, and the other does it with a big bang. The result is much better for the one that chisels away slowly like the tortoise.
Your goal in life is to be like the tortoise, so you want to make sure that you are chipping away slowly and the rocks of life. At first, no one will understand what you are doing because you are moving so slow, but in time they will begin to see it the picture becoming more clear. That is how your life looks when you take a slow approach to moving forward instead of always falling for the quick bursts.
