“Successful Blogs” Are Lying to You
Is it possible to be successful without waking up at 5 AM?
I am an aficionado of life hacks, productivity and personal growth tips.
I love testing methods that I read daily in books and on the internet.
Of course, not everything works. Others, even, may not have the slightest relationship with your lifestyle.
Waking up at 5 AM, exercising several times throughout the day, having an ultra-healthy diet, having done dozens of things before even starting work etc.
The impression it leaves is that you will never be successful until you adopt all these habits.
However, the truth is, none of them will make you a successful person. Understand why now.
Where Does Success Not Come From?
You can read a multitude of posts every day, follow all the influencers on the internet, replicate all the motivational phrases that circulate… it doesn’t matter. None of this will make you a successful person.
Do you know why? Simply because success has no recipe.
We tend to create a sense of urgency in our life and, in addition, think we are doing all wrong.
Productivity hacks will help you a lot, but none of them will turn you into a machine.
Even the “productive” bloggers know this. Yes, they’re great at writing about productivity, but do you mean they’re never late? Who doesn’t feel tired? Or don’t have unforeseen situations?
Clearly yes. And that’s what we’re going to talk about now.
Who Are the Productive and Successful People?
The answer is simple: successful people are those who work hard, seize opportunities at the right time, and believe in what they do. In this way, even luck itself is a variable.
When you launch a project, thousands of barriers appear and critics appear from all sides. To know how to deal with that does not depend on the time you slept or woke up, much less if you have already exercised today.
Steve Jobs — an iconic and hugely influential entrepreneur even after his death — claimed that using LSD to work was one of the most important things he ever did. Being under the influence of drugs and on a constant psychedelic journey, for him, was a great source of creativity.
Okay, but that doesn’t work for 99.9% of people. Most likely will be a bad idea for you.
Then I ask you: was Steve Jobs waking up at 5 AM? Organizing your schedule to the exact minutes? Running marathons?
It does not seem.
In theory, developing skills and knowing tricks for a more productive day will help you reach a goal, but they are not mandatory steps on the road to success.
Many people are organized and productive at extreme levels as a result of their lifestyle, not because of it.
And “productivity bloggers” know this.
Often, they do not practice what they say but still set themselves up as good examples. This is pretty boring.
The truth is that inspirational content attracts more clicks and reads. So if you want to make your audience take off, the best way is to sell a dream making it look simple.
Meanwhile, the person who wrote this content is someone like you and me.
What if My Story Isn’t One of Success and Inspiration?
The answer will depend, but I will tell you a little about my own.
I also feel helpless on Sunday nights. And, by more than I have any free time, hardly I can do something useful at times like this.
As healthy as it is, cooking my food can be something boring and straight I exchange it for quick and readymade snacks. Often out of time.
Wake up early? Very good, but sometimes it’s impossible. And if I do it every day, it’s because I have commitments with other people and not because I’m focused on raising my well-being by the last level.
I enjoy working, and I spend a good part of my day doing it. However, I almost never feel like a producing machine. In this subject, I would give myself a grade of 6 or 7 out of 10.
Oh, and even though I like to work, several tasks in my day are boring. I don’t see any fun in doing them, except for the fact that they are part of a bigger thing (that will pay off in the future).
Among several other things: sometimes I’m dissatisfied with my appearance, I read less than I should, I leave physical exercises aside and make many other mistakes — even in what I’m good at!
Can anyone today admit that making mistakes is part of the human being?
What Is the Ideal of Success?
Success is doing what you like more than you dislike. That means finding a way of working that gives you many moments of joy rather than dissatisfaction.
One of the authors I rely on most to talk about this is Aristotle. For him, happiness is a moment, something we would like to last a long time. Other than that, dissatisfaction and annoyance are natural human states!
Exactly. Happiness is a temporary state, which you wouldn’t like that it ended, but at the same time, it only makes sense if it is finite.
You won’t be successful if you don’t have moments of satisfaction and happiness several times in your day. And the sacrifice is in performing a lot of boring activities to get to that level.
Being successful is not being like Tim Ferriss, who teaches working only four hours a week — it’s not like Steve Jobs, not much of a guru, either healthy.
To succeed is to discover a way of doing what you want with good doses of happiness throughout the day. It has nothing to do with what we idealize when reading an inspiring post title.
Therefore, a “secret spice” is recognizing this. It’s accepting the fact that everybody commits mistakes. Even the most inspiring people inside here share that with us — and we’ve tried to pass it along to readers like you.
It’s a way to make an honest connection with the audience! 🙂
