How often have you heard that you need to sacrifice to be successful?
Many times.
Were you happy making that sacrifice though?
I don’t think so.
Then why do people everywhere tout this practice as being the foundation stone of the success pyramid that you are going to build someday?
Do we need to sacrifice anything in order to be great at something?
No.
Why no sacrifice is needed?
Sacrifice means “giving up something for the sake of other considerations”.
Let’s consider sleep. It attracts by far the most attention from sacrifice aficionados. Most people treat sleep as the enemy. They think sleeping well is a luxury. You can see 5 AM club members online singing songs about how great it feels.
I hate waking up early or depriving my body of sleep and roaming around like a zombie the whole day afterward.
For me, if I am waking up early to do something, it would be a sacrifice.
Would I make it?
That would depend on the thing that I am making it for. That’s the critical part here.
If I love to do the thing for which I am sacrificing my sleep, I would be happy. It wouldn’t bother me a single bit that I am waking up early.
On the contrary, I would love it.
I would be enthusiastic to wake up early and get to that thing as soon as possible. The state would be that I might face difficulty sleeping because I would be too excited for tomorrow morning to wake up and get back to that thing.
Do you think under these circumstances you would need to make any sacrifice? Or you would refer to your waking up early as a sacrifice?
No.
But for another person, this can be a sacrifice because he might not have a goal that excites them that much.
At the higher levels of competitive swimming, something like an inversion of attitude takes place. The very features of the sport that the ‘C’ swimmer finds unpleasant, the top level swimmer enjoys. What others see as boring—swimming back and forth over a black line for two hours, say—they find peaceful, even meditative, often challenging, or therapeutic. They enjoy hard practices, look forward to difficult competitions, try to set difficult goals. Coming into the 5:30 A.M. practices at Mission Viejo, many of the swimmers were lively, laughing, talking, enjoying themselves, perhaps appreciating the fact that most people would positively hate doing it. It is incorrect to believe that top athletes suffer great sacrifices to achieve their goals. Often, they don’t see what they do as sacrificial at all. They like it.
Source: The Mundanity of Excellence, James Clear newsletter
This quote summarises the futility of the word “sacrifice”.
If you like something you wouldn’t need to sacrifice anything for it. You will wait for it eagerly.
Create a goal for yourself like that.
Just imagine, how wondrous would it be to wake up to something that you love doing so much?
If you are able to find that thing, success would not be far.
I write daily here on my blog. There is no limit to the word count. I am not focusing on any topic here. I want to build a daily writing habit. This is Day 47 of the Daily Writing Challenge in 2022.