You wan blow, but you no sabi singâŠyou wan geh money but you no sabi hustle - part 1
Loving the process Vs The rewards; a quick insight into how we (Gen-Z youths) tend to view success.
These are the famous words of a great Nigerian philosopher Zlatan Gbebody :) he is famous for his incredible method of fussing life advice into beautiful musical melodies. Todayâs post is going to be centered on why a lot of youths in their 20âs are so focused on becoming the next big thing, and I am going to be using myself as a case study.
From reading Forbes to Techcrunch, I have always hoped that one day I too would become a reputable person in my society and hopefully the world at large, I would become a person of influence with whom the world will want to reckon with. These thoughts live through my head every single day I wake up and I think itâs starting to affect me negatively.
I have so much focused on the idea of being the next big thing rather than actually working towards the next big thing. Itâs like I live in my own little bubble, my own fantasy, and imagination where I am a successful person but in reality, I am just a broke 22-year-old boy who has not really experienced life.
Although I have had some little wins, like getting featured in a national newspaper, being interviewed on radio, and also being a guest speaker on an online podcast, etc. But these things have only made me more entitled to success rather than inspire me to pursue greater feats.
But I wasnât like this before, I tell myself. I think I have lost my spark, I have let so much noise cloud my ability to think straight, and to be honest, I have not really improved on my programming skills in a while, what used to look like a thing of joy for me has now turned into a boring task that I just want to avoid.
And I hate this, and I donât think I have any excuse that makes sense, just the fact that I have been chasing the highs for so long and the irony is; you canât chase the highs, the highs come to you as a result of doing the things that bring the highs.
PS: For context, âhighsâ can be referred to as being intoxicated/a feeling of achievement but here I use it in a more philosophical way.
Letâs delve into why I feel this way because Iâm positive there are a number of people who are dealing with this type of issue and it would be nice to just spark up a conversation about it.
Firstly, I feel our society has contributed to a lot of young people feeling âentitled to successâ, every single day we are bombarded with stories of tech startups raising millions of dollars, how some other person made millions from trading forex and how a 15-year-old girl got a Ferrari on their birthday and we can only but wonder why our lives suck even more.
I honestly donât think itâs 100% the fault of the media because itâs their job to sell sellable contents (even if itâs crap), but I feel we shouldnât be carried away by the success stories and ignore the process it took to get to that stage.
A lot of the stories you see online are not a result of overnight success, a lot of them worked their brains out to get to where they are and this reminds me of something Mark Manson said in one of his books that âyou should be in love with the process and not the rewards.â
Because even when the feeling of the reward fades, you still have your process to fall back to. And if you have only built yourself to only love the reward and not the process, you will realize you start craving for irrelevant things like a drug addict (e.g social media recognition, being on the top 10 most influential people list, having millions of followers, etc).
Although these things arenât entirely bad, itâs when we focus too much on it rather than the process that births âitâ, that is when we have a problem. Itâs like standing in front of a cake store, you can only see the cake from the glass but canât have it.
So, whatâs next for me now? I am taking this week to learn and understand how I can love the process more rather than focusing on the rewards, I believe this will impact my growth if I am able to figure this out.
If you read up to this point, thanks for reading my thoughts and I would like to hear what you feel about this topic. I will be dropping the part two of this article next week Monday and if you havenât please subscribe to my newsletter so you will be among the first people to get it in their email. Have a lovely day.
PS: Apologies for not posting it on Monday, this is TuesdayâŠhere is it and I hope you enjoyed it. Drop your comments, give this post a like and also share with your friends.
Hmmm... Great post.
It's true that now we tend to chase the allure of success and when we actually start doing the work we realize it is 1. Not as glamorous as it looks.
And 2. It'll probably take longer than you thought.
The one thing I've learnt is to actually really really really love what you do in order to have any chance of being successful at it.
Because in a world of hyper competition it takes a dedication only passion can create to be successful.
Thank you so much for this insight. Falling in love with the process is very crucial oo and then timing is also important. Because sometimes we follow the same processes and don't get the same results, your time is different from Mr B's time