Listening to a podcast recently, I heard the idea, "Success is sequential, not simultaneous." At first it didn't make a lot of sense to me, but as I thought about it, it began to really resonate with me. So often when I am talking to people about their journey, whether it be fitness, career, or personal improvement, they mention their frustration at things not happening fast enough. Once in a while someone will tell me they're happy with their success. Everybody wants to succeed as fast as possible, I've never met anyone who said it was their idea of a good time to struggle.
Whenever you embark on a new journey, you're excited and optimistic. It isn't until a few weeks in, that you realized that this may not be as easy as you thought it would be. You start to experience your first hurdles and roadblocks. It's easy to want to throw in the towel and decide that whatever it is you are trying to do, is not going to work. The harder thing to do, is to stay the course. Success comes from a series of steps, various milestones hit along the way. They have to be hit in a particular order and within specific timing, in order for things to work the way they should. Rarely do you hit multiple milestones at the same time. You certainly don't simultaneously begin a journey and end it.
There are millions of companies around the world capitalizing on our hope that things will happen instantaneously. They offer quick fixes, ways to get rich quickly, weight loss overnight and perfect relationships with no effort. They market to our sense of hope and optimism that this is possible. Imagine if those companies had a tagline that read, "This is going to be hard, you're going to want to give up, and it may take a really long time." Would you buy that product? Of course not! So they tell you it will be easy, it will be quick, it will require no effort and people raise their hands and jump in line.
The bigger the goal, the higher the level of success you are striving for, the more milestones required, the more effort required. If you take pleasure in the fact that you are reaching these milestones and you celebrate along the way, you will feel victorious long before you reach your end goal.
Success comes after a series of well thought out steps and little battles along the way. Success does not happen overnight and it doesn't happen simultaneously along with your decision to achieve it. Stay the course, get back up every time you fall down and keep putting one foot in front of the other. It will happen eventually and won't that victory be sweet?!
