When I was reading Drive by Daniel Pink, I thought of how society tries to make things easy for us. Advertising is all about serving up an easy answer to wants or needs. I posted about the desire we all have to coast in October 2019. I found then that training doesn’t get any easier, but the results are worth it.
Training doesn’t get any easier. But if we are diligent, we can get more effective. Finding success in an endeavor may seem easy from the outside. But it’s the grind, as Daniel Pink wrote, that one has to do every day. It’s getting up early and putting in the miles.
Be patient and train
When I trained for a marathon, I searched for different solutions and different training methods. If there was a solution that would have made it easy to run a marathon without any training, I probably would have stumbled across it. If such a solution existed, I would have been both happy and disappointed. I would have been happy that I would not have had to put in the hours. But I would have been disappointed that the effort was taken away from me. What is the point of a marathon, after all, if it takes little sweat and effort?
Today, all of us have been thrust into a COVID-19 marathon. All of us wish that this crisis would end tomorrow. But it doesn’t look likely. All businesses and employees will have to adjust in some way. Like it or not, we are now all required to train for the next level.
Patience does not mean we simply wait this out. If I just waited for the day of the marathon without training for it, I would have never crossed the finish line. While we wait, we must train. We must prepare.
Turn a crisis into an opportunity
Since we have all been sidelined in some way, how are you using that time to train?
- How are you training physically?
- How are you training mentally?
- How are you training spiritually?
We all have an opportunity to do the work and to make a difference today. Grind through the tasks. Learn from them and become better through them. Training doesn’t get any easier. But the results are worth it. You may not hear a stadium full of applause. But it will be worth it in the long run.
