When I first heard this, I thought to myself – “take the long way? Who the hell wants to take the long way to get to where they want to go? I’m taking the shorter way, every time, so I can save time, beat out my competition and have way less stress along the way”.
Can you relate? I’m sure you can. We’ve all thought about it and done it…plenty of times.
But what if I told you that taking the long way would actually get you to your destination, goal, or dreams even faster? Hear me out…
You see, we’ve grown up in a society where our goal is to win by any means necessary, at any cost, where it’s dog eat dog, mano y mano. Second place is “losing place”, as we all know. First place is all that matters, all that will ever matter and the only one we remember. The rest are just not important.
I grew up thinking this and it greatly influenced my thoughts, actions and results in life. But as you get older and wiser you come to realize that this isn’t true.
Yes, in competitions or games it does matter if you’re purely basing it off of ranking.
But in the game of life, this just simply does not matter…at all.
We’re all on a journey of self growth and moving on different planes. We have different dreams, aspirations, and are just different human beings, if you really get down to basics.
There simply is no reason to compare with one another. None.
1. Sports
For example, I’ve grown up playing sports my entire life. I’ve learned about the value of hard work, dedication and discipline.
Even more so now into my Professional Basketball Career and entrepreneurial endeavors. One of my mottos is that “Hard work, smart work and dedication forever pays.”
So, I understand the amount of work, focus and energy that must go into my craft to perform at my highest level.
I must admit I am guilty of times where I felt, “eh, I can just practice 1 day this week and I’ll still make every shot, be in the best shape and win the game.”
Well, I quickly learned that this just doesn’t work. It takes repetition, 10,000 hours (or more depending on the quality of practice and intenseness of focus).
It takes muscle memory. Heart, soul, blood, sweat, and tears.
The late Kobe Bryant (one of my heroes) said it best:
You can’t cheat the muse.
Former Dallas Cowboy tight end, Jason Witten, beautifully described his inspiration from Kobe’s mantra when he said:
I told him how I had adopted a mantra of his over the years: ‘You can’t cheat the muse’ – as a way to stay disciplined. Those mornings when you didn’t want to wake up, or get in the extra balls after practice. If my son wasn’t putting in the effort for a test at school I would tell him, ‘You can’t cheat the muse.’
You can’t. And everything Kobe did in life, he set the standard. Kobe Bryant knew that the path to success in anything in life is not easy, and not for everyone. You might be able to slide by a day at practice, and get away with it.
But, the muse would know. The muse always knows. As a father, and as a competitor.
I’ll never forget you Kobe, what a damn life. You never cheated the muse, and we are all better off because of your standard of excellence. RIP
Read the full article here: https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/icons-kobe-bryant-and-jason-witten-watching-film-together-you-cant-cheat-the-muse
2. Steroid use in Fitness & Bodybuilding
In Fitness, specifically bodybuilding, some guys resort to steroids just to get an edge on their competitors or just to be “bigger”.
But you know what, they end of getting caught and disqualified from competition. And if they don’t get caught it will catch up with them later on in life with all kinds of ailments and illnesses.
3. Building a house, apartment building, skyscraper, bridge, tunnel, etc.
If we look at building a house, apartment building, skyscraper, bridge, or tunnel, the foundation must be solid and the whole process must be done with precision.
If built with a weak foundation, rushed process with engineers and construction workers simply looking for shortcuts instead of focusing on quality and accuracy, the whole infrastructure will come crashing down.
In J.E. Gordon’s Structures : Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down, we get an in depth insight into how things are built and why things don’t fall down. This book gives us a magnificent, in depth look into this world of structures and is truly fascinating. Here’s a powerful quote from J.E. Gordon:
It is necessary to avoid confusion between the strength of a structure and the strength of a material.
You can grab the book here on Amazon: Structures : Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down
4. Cheating on an exam
I admit, I’ve cheated on an exam. And it did not feel good.
Yeah, I may have gotten a good grade on my exam, but afterwards I felt ashamed and disappointed in myself.
This goes back to our need to be #1 or to beat our peers just to feel a sense of accomplishment and conquering. I must add that this was also fueled by strict Asian parents and the need to please them and feel loved.
Unfortunately, however, when you cheat, you end up cheating on yourself and hurting yourself in the long run.
5. Business profits vs. passions. Straight to the money or focusing on the long game
This is a topic that I hold very near and dear to my heart for I have committed this crime more times than I can count and pains me every time, to think of the time I’ve wasted.
When I graduated college, I had this big dream (and still do) of paying back my parents for putting me through private high school and college.
So I got a job and simultaneously started one of my first businesses at 21, focusing purely on money, on how I could make as much of it as possible, and how many deals I could close and clients I could get.
But those businesses failed.
The jobs I had were soul sucking and painstakingly depressing since what also wanted to do was play professional basketball overseas, travel and make money solely from my businesses.
After these experiences, I realized that I was wrong in pursuing just money.
I should have followed my passions, things that make me feel alive, and that set my soul on fire.
Read more of my views on what passion means to me by clicking here on my other blog post: What is passion?
I should have focused on providing value, attracting success instead of pursuing it and coming from a place of giving versus simply taking.
And so I started this blog, my youtube channel, creating a community, creating a movement, and just giving and sharing all my knowledge and experience to inspire others to take action on actualizing their dreams.
6. Learning a new skill.
Learning a new skill is a wild, fun adventure. It will take you down many paths of wonderment and awe. But once the phase of astonishment has subsided, there appears repetition.
And as the late Zig Ziglar beautifully described:
Repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment
I’m sure you would agree that learning a new skill is often both fascinating yet highly challenging. It requires focus, energy and constant repetition.
Thus, there are no shortcuts. You must take the long way.
7. Growing as a human being
To grow as a human being, whether that be mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually, financially, etc. It takes time. Lots of time.
Yes, there are ways to have breakthroughs and transformations much faster but this also takes time.
Working on yourself, reflection, introspection, failure after failure until you even come close to feeling like you’ve grown to the next level, a better version of yourself.
That feeling we all yearn for, of feeling like we’ve “arrived”, will take time and more work.
Yet some people may never feel like they’ve fully “arrived”.
But thankfully the ability to feel whole is available to us all at any moment, if we just become grateful, happy, and present.
8. Sexual energy and sexual transmutation into creative outlets
Ah, sexual energy.
It is one of the most powerful energies known to man. If harnessed correctly man can do unbelievable things.
In fact, here’s what Napoleon Hill believes about sexual transmutation, in one of my all time favorite books, Think and Grow Rich,
The mere possession of sex energy itself is not sufficient to produce genius. The energy must be transmuted from desire for merely physical contact, into some other form of desire and action before it will lift one to the status of a genius.
I’ve made this a practice of mine, as I practice what is called “Semen retention” and “no fap”, for I too would like to tap into my genius capabilities and perform at the highest level I possibly can.
Semen retention is simply holding my seed, my life force within me, so that I can impregnate the world through my creativity.
No fap is essentially not masturbating and not watching porn.
I know that there are differing viewpoints and different camps when it comes to these two topics.
However, it has been my experience that through keeping my life force within me and not pleasuring myself via masturbation and thus no porn, replaced with meditation, exercise, better habits (especially sleep) and giving myself to my work that I have been able to access a higher level of thinking, awareness, experience incredible, consistent, clean, pure energy, sustain peak performance much more consistently, think more clearly, speak more articulately and many other amazing benefits.
Simply put, instead of releasing my life force and enjoying momentary pleasure via masturbation and porn I have delayed that instant gratification and focus on transmuting that sexual energy through my passions, work and life.
Granted, I do release every 30 days, 90 days or more depending on whether I feel I need to release some sexual tension. But I do this with awareness and that my friend is freedom.
But I digress. I’ll talk more about these two topics in separate posts I have so much to share with you all.
9. Life
The ultimate game. Doing the easy things now to feel short term satisfaction versus doing the necessary hard things in order to live a life of fulfillment, joy and happiness for the long term and rest of your life.
Don’t get me wrong there are times where shortcuts make more sense, such as keyboard shortcuts, spark notes or cliff notes to help you understand the gist about a book, jumping over a puddle of water instead of having to go all the way around where it’s dry.
But for the big decisions or important things in life, it’s almost always better to go the long way.
Do what is right. Always. For doing the wrong thing will lead you astray.
Be patient in the long term, but impatient in the short term.
However, don’t take my word for it.
Try it for yourself.
Experiment.
I have a pretty strong inkling that you will feel the same.
With love,
Sonam