omeone asked me in an interview recently what my greatest achievements are. Aside from learning how to tie a jelly snake in a knot with my tongue, I have two no brainer answers I trot out whenever someone asks me this. The things I’m most proud of in my life are maintaining a significant weight loss for over 10 years and creating this blog you’re reading. Once I sent off my answers in an email, I realised they aren’t really achievements at all because I haven’t ‘achieved’ them. There’s no past tense, I’m not done with either of these things. These supposed ‘achievements’ aren’t finished and neither of them will ever be finished. I work on both of them every day and have done for almost a decade. It’s highly likely that I will work on both of them for at least the next decade, the weight loss one I’ll be working on for the rest of my life. It felt a bit weird that I hadn’t actually achieved my achievements and that technically speaking, I kind of never would.
It made me realise that you don’t ever really finish the important things in life. You can finish a report, you can finish an assignment or you can finish a session at the gym but you can’t really finish the big stuff. The important stuff, the life changing stuff.
There’s no box to tick that completes the journey to happiness, weight loss, a successful career, a functional marriage or a good life. How do you know when you’re done? When can you relax? The answer is, you can’t.
I felt strangely comforted by the thought that longevity and commitment is almost always rewarded. Sometimes it’s nice to know that slow and steady does win the race and that things that come too quickly or easily – money, weight loss, career success – don’t always stand the test of time.
That’s not to say that good things can’t and shouldn’t happen quickly because for some people they do and that is excellent… for them. In my experience though, truly good things don’t come to people looking for a quick fix. Good things come to people who work hard. Consistently and continuously. It sounds boring but I’d rather work for a long time on something that has a higher and more steady rate of return than work on shorter term, riskier goals that end up being a waste of time or give me very short lived pleasure.
If you’re struggling because amazing things don’t seem to be happening in your life, I want to tell you they probably are. As long as you’re waking up every day and working towards the things that matter, you’re winning. The best things in life are worth working for and the really, really awesome rewards take ages to surface and when they do surface, they require a lot of maintenance. Which is rather excellent because otherwise, what’s the point in all this? I don’t want to finish anything until I’m a very, very old lady.
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P.S If you’re a blogger from Adelaide, and you’re stuck in your blogging journey I’d love to help you!