An Ancient, Ugly Secret to Success
Whether it’s forgotten or ignored, it works. And it’s so easy.
Everyone I know wastes time doing useless shit.
I have friends who play with fidget spinners, spend copious amounts of time arguing on the internet, or watching all seasons of Friends for the third time. Personally, I’m incredibly good at video games. It’s a totally useless skill, but being good gives me a sense of accomplishment when I play.
The problem is that my sense of accomplishment is fake. I’m not actually accomplishing anything when I speed run through a level of Hitman in under ten minutes. But it feels good, especially when I complete some inane challenge that the game developers created.
It feels good in the moment, but there’s something missing.
The aftermath is empty.
A lot of our biggest time drains feel good in the moment, but strip of us the bigger rewards in our future. In my case, there are no rewards in playing video games, especially not when I’m 50. There are no future rewards to binge watching all seasons of Friends for the third time or staying up to date with the latest memes.
It’s nothing but an escape.
In terms of productivity, doing useless shit is the biggest mistake you can make. You completely missing the point.
If you’re capable of achieving peak efficiency in useless shit, imagine what you could do if you spent your talents on something useful.
Peter Drucker, management guru of all management gurus, made the distinction between efficiency and effectiveness.
Efficiency is doing things right.
Effectiveness is doing the right things.
A lot of people who are extremely good at doing useless shit are extremely efficient, but completely ineffective.
For a lot of people in their teens and twenties, their life is a fucking mess with no direction. I can relate, because I was there. I’m not at my destination yet and I have a long way to go, but I’m fucking going.
You can take care of your shit. You can get your proverbial shit together and create a life that is worth living, even if you don’t have the life you want.
It’s the forward movement that matters.
The useless shit you do distracts you from your future.
Useless shit is a distraction from your vision, your purpose, and your goals.
Sometimes, useless shit is a distraction from the fact that you don’t even have a vision, a purpose, or any goals.
The Boogeyman Is Instant Gratification.
Instant gratification is the monkey mind. When you choose to do something that feels good in the moment instead of doing something that benefits your future, you’re playing into the hands of the monkey mind.
Have you ever gone to the store when you’re hungry? You know how you buy all kinds of useless junk food? That’s the monkey mind in control. Your monkey mind wants it BAD and it wants it NOW.
Instant gratification is taking pleasure in the moment over greater pleasure in the future.
Instant gratification is playing video games instead of doing that productive thing you know you need to do.
Instant gratification is the opposite of sacrifice.
…And sacrifice is a requirement for success.
Sacrifice is not the same as prioritize
In the biblical stories of Abraham, he made a significant sacrifice before taking on a new challenge. In one story, God tells Abraham to sacrifice what is most dear to him: his son.
That’s a very accurate description of what taking on a daunting challenge is like: when you take on a new challenge, you make a sacrifice.
Of course, Abraham didn’t actually have to sacrifice his son. He just had to be willing to sacrifice him. God interrupted, and told Abraham to sacrifice a goat instead.
In modern times, we often call sacrifices prioritization because sacrifice carries a religious connotation. I used to belittle sacrifice as a primitive, religious practice that had no benefits, and thought about prioritizing things.
Sacrifice and prioritization are different.
Prioritization is to put one thing ahead of something else. Sacrifice is to eliminate one thing for another.
Prioritization means to do one thing less than another, but still do. Sacrifice is to completely give up on a good thing in the present in the pursuit of something greater in the future.
Sacrifice is giving up frivolous sex and casual dating for the pursuit of a partner that can last a lifetime.
Taking on a big challenge doesn’t just require a little prioritization. It requires wholehearted sacrifice.
Big Sacrifices, Big Rewards
If you want a better future, you have to give up something valuable today for something better tomorrow. There’s no such thing as something for nothing. Behind any great accomplishment and undertaking lies tremendous sacrifice.
Whether you do something as simple as sacrifice sleep to make more money, sacrifice partying with your friends for your physical health, or sacrifice five fertile virgins to the feathered serpent god, Quetzalcoatl, for a fruitful harvest…
Well, that might be excessive, but you get the point.
These are textbook sacrifices. If you want to achieve anything worthwhile in your life, you have to make sacrifices. There’s a neat, little distinction I’ve seen with virtually all religious sacrifices that I’ve come across…
The bigger your sacrifice, the bigger your reward.
If you give up something that is extremely valuable to you, often something that even feels incredibly painful to give up, your rewards are far bigger.
I mentioned how Abraham was told to sacrifice his son, and how Abraham was willing to sacrifice him. There’s a chance that your rewards hinge not only on what you will sacrifice, or what you have sacrificed, but what you are willing to sacrifice.
You still have to sacrifice something, but maybe your rewards are bigger when you are willing to sacrifice even the things dearest to you, even if you don’t actually sacrifice them? Whatever benefits come from sacrifice, one thing is certain: the benefits are real.’
How To Make A Modern Day Sacrifice Without Killing A Goat
I’m about to get extremely practical on you, so I’m going to ask that you actually do what I ask of you.
If you complete these steps, you’ll know what to sacrifice, what to sacrifice for,and your life will be heading in a better direction than when you started reading this article.
1: Diagnose Your Useless Shit
Write down three things you do every day that are completely useless and do not serve your future, your vision, your purpose, or your goals at all.
You have to sacrifice at least one of these things to move forward in your life. It’s a bitter pill to swallow because you’re probably enjoying these things or you wouldn’t be doing them. But if you’re reading this, you’re already aware that sacrifice is painful.
Making this sacrifice will hurt right now… But it will hurt even more five to ten years from now if you don’t make the sacrifice.
2: Pick Something To Sacrifice For
Have a goal.
I shouldn’t really have to say more than that because it seems everyone emphasizes the importance of having goals. I don’t completely agree with the semantics, but I’ll probably end up writing more about vision, purpose, and goals at some point the future.
For now, just set a fucking goal that you really want in your life.
I’ll write more about effective goal setting later if it’s necessary.
3: Pick A Thing To Sacrifice
Modernity has moved us from a world of physical things to a world of intellectual things. Many of our habits and pursuits are intellectual instead of physical, so making a sacrifice doesn’t have the same visceral impact that it would in the past. We’re not sacrificing animals. We’re sacrificing machines, controllers and pizza.
The beauty is that almost all of us have countless things readily available to sacrifice, but the intellectual reality we live in makes it possible to retract sacrifices that we’ve claimed to make through a simple reinstall, a quick Google search or something along those lines.
To make a sacrifice stick, you have to make it painful, external and drastic.
The pain has to be with you at all times to remind you of what you have given up in pursuit of a better future. By sacrificing something you truly love or enjoy, the pain will come automatically. That pain will provide you with motivation to seek the better future that you sacrificed for.
What’s left is making your sacrifices external and drastic.
Here’s what I mean by picking a thing to sacrifice.
If you want to sacrifice watching TV in order to further your education, sell the TV. If you don’t have a TV, you can’t watch it. You can’t retract that sacrifice without buying a new TV.
If you want to sacrifice playing video games in order to get in better physical shape, sell the console.
Of course, there’s a third step. Just getting rid of something is not enough of a sacrifice.
4: Take Action Towards Your Better Future
Immediately after making the sacrifice, take an action that commits you to your future. Once you’ve sold the TV or console, put that money into your future. Even if you have pending bills that you can’t pay, put that money towards the thing you sacrificed for.
Buy books, buy a gym membership, buy training gear, buy a video camera, buy a microphone… Whatever you decided to make a sacrifice for, take action towards it.
Even if you’re bad at it, take action towards it.
Go Sacrifice Something.
I promise it will change your life.
Peace.
