on seeking immediate gratification

    For the longest time, I’ve been in a cycle of dreaming of my "best self", taking a few extreme steps in an attempt to reach this notion within 1 week, and failing miserably — so miserably it takes me weeks to recover and try again. This endless cycle perpetuates the misery I continue to feel every day as I see myself as a failure, again and again, when the truth that’s taken me so long to realize and put into action is that change does take time.

    Of course, I could blame part of this cycle on social media. Say that the continuous feed of depressing and over-beautified content makes me feel as though I am not enough, and in fact, will never be. Unless I get this specific clothing piece. Or this specific vitamin. Or start this particular workout routine. Or launch a startup. Or become a millionaire before the age of 25. Or get into Harvard. Or start traveling the world.

    You get my point.

    While it is true that in today’s day and age, we are fed with content that makes it hard to appreciate life as it is for us today (god I know this sounds cliche), I’ve come to realize blaming a societal phenomenon that doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon is a fruitless and endless battle.

    (I know what you’re thinking. Wowww… what a shocking discovery. Bear with me.)

    The problem is we want everything to happen for us at once. We want to start that business, we want to lose that weight, we want to grow this skill and that skill, and oh, one more skill, we want to eat healthy, we want to stretch 2x a day and go for runs and read 30 pages of our book every day… and when we fail to achieve even one of these goals, the most dangerous thought of all begins to take root.

    Well, I already messed up… is it even worth it to do the rest of these things? I’ll start over tomorrow.

    As soon as that thought process can take over, we immediately fall victim to this cycle yet again.

    What I’ve picked up so far is that the key to escaping this track is to choose carefully what you want to invest your time into, and adjust your schedule for yourself.

    Yes, you want to plan your future travel, and you want to start developing apps, you want to perfect all these other random skills and be “the best you can be” immediately, but in reality, you need to conserve your energy and spread it wisely. There are key things you need to focus on.

    So after failing again and again to implement new strategies, from forcing a schedule to writing millions of checklists, I’ve created acceptance for myself and believe I can now truly shift my attention to the things that matter.

    For me right now, that means I focus on getting better in the sphere of my job before moving on to tackle other projects. This has also required self-awareness, as I realize the reason I try to shift to outside projects is because I feel inadequate in my workspace, so I seek to set my own value outside of it. Avoiding this impending impostor syndrome does me no good. I need to own up to my failures and create my own success. And that means sitting down and understanding what I need to focus on to find success in my current sphere of work.

    Additionally, I’ve learned it means avoiding the things that bring me immediate gratification and focusing on the things that take time but have the biggest end output. Instead of watching easy videos on things I understand, I need to watch harder videos and do lessons that force be to become familiar with the things I suck at (and I suck at a lot of things).

    It’s time for me to become less obsessed with perfection, and more obsessed with the process of being wrong, then learning to be right, over and over again.

Signing off,

nexisphere