There Is No Shortcut That Leads to Winning
Every time I tried to take the easy road out, I lost. There are no easy wins. The two terms don’t go together. As a professional, it takes an obnoxious amount of work to beat even the worst of teams. Because even the so called bad teams put their time in at practice and are only a few surprising wins away from being a team on the come up. So when you start looking for shortcuts and forward to days off, I promise you there is someone — be it another person, another writer, a new employee or another company — who is looking to use your laziness to their advantage. And good for them, they should be. Don’t blame them, blame yourself.
I hate losing. I always have. At anything, it doesn’t even matter what. I don’t have kids but if I did I assure you I wouldn’t willingly let them win — at anything — ever. Mainly because I’m obsessed with winning and losing hangs over my head like an ugly hat I’ve been forced to wear. But secondly because letting kids win sets them up for disappointment later in life when they finally match up against an opponent who is out for blood in a game of monopoly. It will be my duty as a parent to hand them their first loss at every game they ever play, teach them what they did wrong, the mistakes they made and what led to their inevitable loss so they can learn from it and use it. The way I see it, if I do anything short of that, I’ll have failed as a parent.
Entitlement is dangerous. I know because I’ve lived with it and I’m not even a full on millennial. I was born in 1987 and remember life without cell phones and the internet as a teenager. But I still felt entitled. Entitled to a better life than the one I was living but unwilling to put the work in. From the first time I watched A Bronx Tale and was introduced to the quote “The working man is a sucker”, I couldn’t help but agree and try to find my way around becoming such. I came from a family of hardworking people but to me none of them seemed happy. They all seemed to hate their jobs and none seemed to be particularly well compensated for all the time they spent doing something they hated. Subconsciously, at a very young age, I told myself I’d never let myself become that person.
There is no magical formula to success. No life hack will be the reason you reach your life’s ambitions. The trick is to find the thing you love to do, the one other people say you do so well and yet doesn’t even feel like work to you because it comes so goddamn naturally — and make a career out of it. Find a way. To tell me there’s not one is you looking for the easy way out. It’s an excuse you tell yourself to justify you showing up to the job you hate five days a week for the next forty years of your life. Because in this day and age, teenagers have made careers out of playing their favorite video games. Writers who traditional publishers wouldn’t respond to are hitting bestsellers lists. The opportunities are there, they’re just not paved in smooth and easy roads.
It will get difficult. There will come a point you begin to question why you even bother. The tenacious will move past that point, remember why they do what they do, continue to do it and at some point after they will start to feel like maybe they’re flat out not good enough. Maybe they just don’t have what it takes. I speak from experience because I just hit that point. I’ve been losing, or at least feeling like I haven’t been winning and it fucking hurts. Posts missing their marks. Others I spent a ton of time on and thought would do well, have gone completely unnoticed. I’ve been off lately and I could give you a million and one excuses as to why, as well as one or two legitimate theories as to what has changed but what it really comes down to is me.
Not so much that I’ve been looking for shortcuts but more so that I just haven’t put the same time in to writing and everything that goes into it as I was. In fairness, it wasn’t necessarily a choice — I took a new job and have far less free time than I’d like to. But again, it comes down to me. The fact I’ve taken a new job has not left me with no time to write. It has simply just cut down the amount of free time I have. It’s hard to come home from working eight hours plus commute time, still follow my process and have the same tenacious dedication I did. I have to restructure, take a step back and figure out what my writing has been lacking. I’m not looking for shortcuts, I’m prepared for the long, hard and gritty road that leads to victory.
