If Life Isn’t A Sprint, It’s Definitely Not A Marathon

Over the last few years, my views about life, work, and fulfillment have been steadily changing. There will likely be no end to that evolution, but one major shift has happened that I’ve only recently been able to express. It is said that life is a marathon, not a sprint but when looking from a holistic perspective I’ve come to believe that neither are true.

After writing my last post (about the False First Step) and finally publishing the idea that I held onto for so long, it felt amazing to put it out into the world. I had finally hit my goal of sharing the idea and even better, it seemed to really resonate with people.

Despite receiving a fair amount of attention (and some criticism), Break the Twitch isn’t any different, other than the fact that there are a few hundred more of you getting this blog post delivered to your email now.

It’s not that I expected anything to change, but for a long time I’ve viewed goals and aspirations in a completely backward way. Maybe it wasn’t a conscious thought, but somewhere lodged in my brain was this idealized concept of success. This magical place where we finally “succeed” in life, everything gets really easy and everything is great. We work hard, sprint towards a goal then, phew. We made it!

I used to want to win the lottery, I mean, how great would it be to never have to work again. While a boatload of cash might solve some financial issues, it won’t actually solve much else unless we really know what to do with it. It’s almost impossible to know what to do with $100 million until we know what to do with $100.

We still have to continue working towards something or else what was the point? All the money in the world won’t do push-ups for us or steam vegetables and feed them to us (well, maybe that last one, eventually). But let’s pretend there is, in fact, that point when we’ve made it, what then?

I remember the last time I had a goal that I wanted to hit by losing weight. It was about four years ago. After six months of working out every day and eating perfectly clean meals, I hit it. Satisfied with my progress, all of the habits that got me to that goal slowly went away. I had achieved my goal. I had succeeded, completed the challenge and then returned right back to the weight I was when I started.

So if there is no finish line, no goal weight, it seems to me that success, or perhaps the life we want to live, is simply a line. And our current lives another line.

It is only doing the things that matter to us each day that begin to blur those two lines together, eventually creating a single existence. Assuming we want to stay there or continue our growth, there is no end where we’ve “made it” and should stop doing the things that got us there.

Perhaps the idea of enlightenment is actually just the consistent pursuit of enlightenment. Greatness, the consistent pursuit of greatness itself.

I’m never* going to sell this website for millions of dollars and cash out so that I can finally do what I want. The hundreds of hours of work that I put into Break the Twitch every month is the life I want. If I want to share my ideas with and, ideally, help more people with my writing, I have to keep writing. If I want to keep a decluttered home, I have to continually declutter and not bring new things into it. I have to continually avoid the temptation of online purchases to make sure that I’ll be ready and able to buy a plane ticket when a good friend gets married and wants me there.

Some days feel successful, others might feel like failures, but every day is a new opportunity to move those lines a little closer together.

For more on this, check out the video below or click here.

*wait, how many million did you say? just kidding.