Intro
Hello friends and readers! This blog is going to be a bit more wide in it's scope as I feel the contents are relevant to life at large. This is a thought I've been ruminating a lot on as I enter my 30s. What's the thought? Putting in 100% effort. It sounds like a simple enough thought. Just apply yourself fully to whatever you do, and boom you're putting in 100%, right? That's what I thought, and over the years and with all the work I've made it would probably be fair to say I gave 100%, but there's a piece to this puzzle that's missing. I just wasn't very happy.
Are we on 10 yet?
When I look back on my 20's I can see, very clearly now that I was operating under a simple paradigm. "Work hard and you'll make it". It's a nice platitude and one many people in life like to use and say (especially to cheer up others), but there's a lot missing from that statement to allow you to actualize the necessary changes to improve your life. To be fair, I wouldn't be where I am without putting in the hard work, but I'm not as far ahead as I believe I could be either. This platitude doesn't account for: vision, burnout, quality of life, and much much more. Hard work is important, but it's not the whole story. So what is the whole story?
It's that you have to work hard, on every single aspect of your life.
This clicked for me when I was browsing Twitter and came across the mantra "Train Everything". It seems simple enough, and in concept it is, but in practice it's a whole different ballgame. I can say with complete self assurance that I am a hard worker, but I was very limited in my scope. I was a hard worker, but not a hard-working person. I worked very intensely to master my craft, but the success I crave for requires me to be able to master my life. If I wanted to leave a legacy, I had to realize I had not done enough to do so
As I ruminated a bit, I thought it would be interesting to try to understand what was the exact capacity I had been operating at. I certainly wasn't operating at 100%, given the new knowledge I had accumulated, so what was it? I think if I had to contextualize the best effort I had put into the things I cared about in life and what I think what my life would look like if everything I wanted to do was done at 100%, I think I would come out at about maybe 20% of my capacity.
This was scary but exciting. Scary because I had to realize I had not been living my life to the fullest. Exciting because now I can finally understand what that's like, and what I can do to get there. I can finally tackle other dreams that were dormant in me to fill out my life, and it's what has motivated me to push past my own self limitations since the beginning of the year.
Outro
As I head into my 30s, the one thing that’s been a new constant in my thinking process is that I want to live at 100%. That means do what I want to do with fire and passion, and learning how to overcome the fear of being uncomfortable. Learning new things has been life enriching, and while it’s not directly related to my art, it will ultimately inform and help me get my voice out into the world. The other perk of living at 100% is that I’m so much happier and ready for the challenges and gifts life brings, whatever those may be.
Thank you for reading, see you next time.