Go again

Go again:

Go again.

It’s hard to do something for a very long time.

It's hard to stay consistent in your work, especially when you’ve tasted success.

Success makes you lazy.

It makes you believe you’re better than you are.

It makes you believe you don’t need to work.

That you can just coast on what you’ve done.

Sure you can do that, but if you want to be great, you have to do it for a very long time.

Buffet’s track record is 60+ years of investing.

Are you ready for that, if you’re so lucky to get there?

If you want to be a good writer, you have to write for a while. Not like 5-10 years, like 25-50 years.

All the time.

Consistently producing work whether it’s good or not.

Because eventually it will be good.

There’s going to be a lot of garbage that happens in the middle.

That’s ok.

That’s how it works.

No one hits on everything they do.

In baseball, you can go to the hall of fame if you hit the ball in play 3 out of every 10 times.

Think about that. 300 hitters in baseball are hall of famers and 200 hitters are nobodies. These guys just got one more hit every 10 and they’re considered the best of all time.

But that means they had to miss 7 times.

They failed 7 times yet succeeded 3 times.

The other baseball players fail 8 times and succeed twice.

That extra hit makes all the difference.

All you need is to be a bit better than the next person.

1% improvement every day will put you on a different path compared to everyone else.

Knowledge, like money, compounds.

The 8th wonder of the world as per Einstein.

Knowledge and learning isn’t a linear path.

It’s exponential.

But you have to commit to the work.

The work never stops.

You always have to be learning.

Never get comfortable with your knowledge.

There’s always more to learn and experience.

Challenge yourself.

Embrace struggle.

Do things that are hard precisely because they are hard.

Do not take the easy road out.

If something scares you, it’s likely you should do it.

Our future is uncertain but you can choose to pursue the hard road.

Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life. as per Naval.

Seek discomfort.

Even when you’ve reached the mountaintop, send yourself to the bottom and start again.

Always be challenging yourself.

You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. Just put in the time and you’ll get there.

It will be hard, you’ll fail a ton along the way and you’ll want to quit, but keep going.

If you do, you’ll realize how much you can really do.

Losing weight was one of those for me.

If you give yourself months to accomplish something, you can do much more than you imagine.

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I wanted to lose weight but didn’t know I could drop ~25 pounds in 3 months.

Trust the process. Do the work for a long period of time and you’ll eventually see the results.

Can you really write for 10-20 years consistently?

That’s hard but I think I’m ready.

If I can make money by writing and being myself, that would be incredible.

That’s the way of the future.

Individuals now have more power online than they ever have.

Creating a personal brand can set you up for life.

All you have to do is be you.

It’s what Joe Rogan has done and now he’s bigger than the mainstream media.

Think about that for a second.

A stand-up comic who loves the UFC has a bigger voice than CNN, the New York Times and BBC. More people listen to him than any mainstream media outlet.

That’s incredible power that we have not seen before.

The opinions of individuals weren’t known before because there were only specific sources of information. The radio or a few TV channels were controlled by the state so in order to get your voice heard, you had to go to those places to work.

Now anyone with a phone has a voice that can be heard by the whole world.

If you want to be heard by the world, you have to put in the work.

You have to have an interesting view of the world.

But that’s the thing, there are thousands of people online who have the same interesting view of the world that you do.

Not even that.

Do it for yourself.

Create for yourself because there are so many other people like you.

Get over yourself and looking like an idiot at the beginning.

No one cares.

No one is watching yet everyone is watching.

When someone usually does something different, people usually pay attention for the first little while then stop caring.

We’re all too wrapped up in our own lives to really pay attention that much to someone else’s.

Even those close to you, they barely pay attention.

I know my family have only read a tiny bit of what I’ve written this year.

They don’t care.

So do it for you.

Create for your future and past self.

Create so your younger self learns something.

Create so your older self is proud of what you’re doing.

Make yourself proud.

Tim Urban, a famous blogger, has an interesting saying about this on a podcast done with Tim Ferris.

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Imagine you’re writing to a stadium full of yourself.

As long as you’re happy with your work, who cares?

But it’s hard to do that consistently for long periods of time.

Decades.

It takes decades of commitment to become a master of something,

You just have to keep at it.

Keep hammering away at the muse as per Steven Pressfield in War of Art.

Don’t worry about that little voice that’s telling you to stop.

Don’t worry about self-doubt. Don’t listen to the devil inside you.

Do the work and the rest will come.

Commit to the process.

Go again.