Staying power 💥

These days, every morning I wake up, I have one phrase in my head - “staying power”.

Of course it is related to life dealing some punches recently, but there’s also a lot of friends stuck in unhappy jobs or not getting jobs etc.

Staying power is the ability to persist through adversity. But where does it come from?

You can watch a lot of motivational videos daily and while that may give some temporary hits, that is not enough to sustain and act on a daily basis.

For some people, sheer choice of being willful can perhaps do it. But I think it misses the core point - you can be long-term willful only on things you truly internally resonate with. Otherwise this willfulness is also short-lived. In fact, if you are willful with your head about things that are not aligned with your heart/gut, that leads to dissonance and some internal corrosion.

Is optimism the answer then? Just a dreamy eyed notion of the future that you strongly crave that enables you to push forward? Could be, but in most cases in life, destination is very far and fuzzy, so that can’t give you day-to-day joy.

I’ve come to realise the answer to this may be earnestness. Was talking to Dad recently and we were talking about how any journey taken earnestly is never wasted. #middleclassidealism

Earnestness comes down to core motivations - why you do what you do. But there’s more to it, earnestness also means doing things for the right reasons. Now, what are right reasons? I think it’s a vast territory and hard to exhaustively define, but the abstract point here is doing things for their own sake rather than as a means to an end.

This is also related to the questions to identify beauty that I mentioned in Finding Beauty

1. If this goes out of my life tomorrow, will I regret it?

2. Do I like talking about this endlessly to my close people?

3. Does the mention of this excite me?

You see this enough in startup contexts - people starting startups just for money or the tag of becoming a founder. That generally ends up in misery, until you like the elements of day-to-day —> the problem you are solving, the customers you are solving it for, the product you are making for them. The process of creating a product and company is so messy, that the only thing that grounds you for the long-term is the love for these daily things in that specific context.

Note that earnestness doesn’t guarantee outcomes. There might be one founder who started up just to become rich and actually became rich, and there might be another one who did the entire journey with the right motivations but ended up failing.

As I was talking to a friend about the recent Olympics episode with Vinesh Phogat -

But right reasons alone are not enough, that is just the intent part of the equation. There are a lot of well-meaning folks that dont get anywhere, because there is also execution capability. You do have to try as hard as you can.

The ‘trying as hard as you can’ is also related to regret minimisation. There are a lot of smart, ambitious people who become bitter over time, because they didnt get the outcomes they wanted. And that is not because of lack of intent, but often it’s because of the lack of effort/courage. And as we all know from Bezos, most regrets in life are from acts of omission rather than acts of commission.¹

Hence I think earnestness is at the core of staying power. And there will be of course times in between when you will not like the daily life, then brute force willfulness gets you through temporarily. And then again you’ll be reminded of why you like the thing itself in the first place. And in this entire cycle, gratitude helps.²

\(O = p * t\)

Once you have staying power (p), the only variable to get to output is time. That is anyway outside your control, so focus on getting staying power right through earnestness and willfulness. Easier said than done :)

1. Even after that, outcomes are not guaranteed. Because the missing piece is luck. But that you anyway cant control, so ditch.

2. There are a lot of examples of people who started out earnestly, but because they didnt get the outcomes they wanted (because of luck), they became cynical. That I think is the biggest danger to earnest people, and I have no answer on how to re-ignite a broken spirit.