The Grind vs The Glory

Today we are bombarded with imagery and messaging that shows us how brilliant other people’s live are. We are shown a sneak peak into the lives of these people who seem to be on endless holidays. These people have it all sorted. Money appears to be no object.

But this is all The Glory, and The Glory is all a lie.

The Glory is just a snapshot. We see it both with people we know in our networks and in the media with celebrities. The best recent example of The Glory is the Fyre Festival. Gather a few models together, post their day on Instagram, and you have the illusion of a glorious beach party that everyone would love to join even though it’s all staged.

It is almost always all staged.

Your friend posting online about her weekend in the sun in Spain is #blessed, but she’s also #cursed. She’s cursed by the need to show this to everyone she ever met in order to feel some kind of validation, and this is a completely natural reaction in human behaviour.

We evolved as a social species, and so we need group validation. It’s the human equivalent of a dog showing you a shoe when you walk in the door. It works to bring us together and demonstrate our functional value to others, but on the global level and without enough reality checks it gets out of control.

What we don’t see is The Grind.

The Grind is the ultimate reality check, what really happens. Did your friend mention in her post that her flight to Spain was delayed by 4 hours? That her hotel is far worse than it looked online? That she twisted her ankle climbing down the cliff to the beach where she took her magnificent photo? No, of course she didn’t. She simply posted that perfect moment that made it all worth it in her mind, the Glory moment you see. You didn’t see her grind behind it.

It’s far more interesting for us to read the Harry Potter books than it would have been to watch J.K. Rowling spend 9 hours a day at her laptop in the corner of her house just to write out 10 pages.

It’s great to watch someone from our country win a gold medal at the Olympics, but we didn’t want to go out every morning at 5am to watch their training 6 days a week for 3 and a half years.

The Revenant was a great film, stunning to watch and it captures the bleakness of the northern tundra and Leonardo DiCaprio’s tussle with the bear. But none of us wanted to go into wildest Canada in the freezing forest for 3 months just to capture the perfect sunrise in 5 seconds.

The Grind is where The Glory is made.

The biggest trick you can play on yourself is to believe you can create your own Glory without any Grind. If you’ve ever tried something simply for The Glory, that is why you failed. You failed because you vastly underestimated the sheer amount of persistence it takes to produce those fleeting moments, and so you didn’t have the stomach for it.

Those who persist understand one radical truth — that actually, the real glory is The Grind. They love The Grind, not the outcome.

“Follow your passion” is often a misguided piece of advice, because most people passionately enjoy those Glory moments, they were created for our consumption. We binge on Glory moments one after another without a second thought about the hundreds of hours that went into crafting each one.

The better advice is to follow The Grind that you relish. Whatever the output, it will end up magnificent if you relish The Grind. Understanding this core concept is a big step to finding a grind that will leave you feeling fulfilled.