“Everything will be awesome when…” “If this happens, it will change everything…” “I just need to reach the tipping point…” I think all of these sentences we either think or say on a fairly regular basis. I’m guilty of it sometimes multiple times a day. I sometimes get caught in these loops of evaluating decisions in my life or business and try to navigate the best way forward. In some ways, I think that it is part of my entrepreneurial mindset of being a problem solver. However, I think the real reason is the desire for some sense of control over my own destiny. Too often I feel that I am just a passenger, and that if I could just take the steering wheel and drive, everything would work out better. But that is a false reality because life will never be under control. There will always be something that can go better, something that we aspire to achieve, or a slight sidestep to what we are currently doing. In my work, I try to emphasize that progress is more important than perfection. Admittedly, I have not listened to my own advice and have ended up frustrated on multiple occasions. If we don’t have control over our lives, then why try to do anything at all? It’s because the balance of control in our lives is much more nuanced than just the binary reality of being in control or out of control.
Most of society will say that we have the power to create our own reality. And I very much do believe that. But that is different from controlling our own reality. In Orwell’s most famous work, he mentioned, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” While the application of this thought was in the context of a controlled society, it also speaks to our own existence. We can’t do anything about the past or the future without doing something about the present. One of the most incredible things about being a human is our capacity of our minds to solve problems, to create, and to dream. But we can only take action in the present. All of the statements at the beginning of this talked about things that could happen in the future. None of it had anything to do with the present. And this is precisely why life will seemingly be always out of control. Expectations of future progress that ultimately don’t become a reality lead to crushing disappointment. But there wasn’t really any more of an opportunity for success than there was for failure. The best that we can do is live in our present moment, make the best decisions in that moment, and release the expectations of the future. Just LET GO.
It was one of the major lessons that I had to learn as an entrepreneur. When you have an idea, you almost can see a roadmap to how things will play out. It can be helpful for goal setting and can even help create a product that has never been seen before. But the attachment to that singular vision is where everything goes wrong. I’m not much of a boxer but one of my favorite quotes that Mike Tyson said was, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” That punch is always life. That vision that is held so dearly seems more distant when things don’t go to plan. There is a slight panic that sets in with feeling behind, or off the mark of the goal. Now there is more pressure to get things back on track or else who knows what could happen. That fierce loop that we all get caught in when we inherently care about something is why we will never have full control over life. Nobody can anticipate getting punched in the face, literally or figuratively. The real culprit here is expectations. We expect things to go a certain way because it has been played out in our minds. But what if, as hard as it may seem, we go after things in life without expectation? Truly, no expectation. It may leave some space for things to play out in an unforeseen and potentially more positive way.
As an athlete, I’ve also been a big fan of visualization as it relates to performance. This comes across to my life as an entrepreneur but I’ve done it the most in my athletic endeavors. Visualization plays probably one of the biggest roles in performing at a high level. But one of the lessons that I had to learn was to release the expectation associated with that visualization. There became a fundamental difference between the belief in myself, and how that reflected on my feelings about the reality of the situation. A good example was when I would race triathlon. Any long distance race becomes a battle of the mind more than the body. There is the physical component of training but there is the mental fortitude needed to continue when the body wants to stop. I could visualize a race from the swim, to transition, the bike, and going all the way to the finish line. I even had a time in my head that I wanted to beat, the goal. One of the first times I fell short of my goal, I was incredibly disappointed. I felt like I had failed even though I had still performed at a really high level. As I continued to race, I learned that the challenge was to see how close to that goal could I get while dealing with whatever came up on the day of the race. This could be not fueling properly given the conditions of the day, a mechanical problem on the bike like a flat tire, or getting a horrible blister on my foot while running. None of these were part of the visualization but they were very much part of the reality. So in each moment throughout the race, I stopped trying to calculate what my finish time would be, what I would think of myself if surpassed it or fell short. Instead, the thoughts became about the present moment and letting go of the expectation that I would beat the time. The best races I ever had happened when this was the mindset. And this was because all I could control was the present.
Life will ebb and flow. Life will be easy at times and it will also be incredibly difficult. But the way it ebbs and flows is out of our own control. There are way too many factors in life that lead to something actually happening in our life. I’ll never forget when I was a kid, my neighbor’s aunt worked in the World Trade Center. She worked at the top of the tower and on 9/11, she was late for work that day by 10 minutes. She was waiting for the elevator in the lobby when the attack happened. Had everything been in her control, I think her story would be quite different. As difficult as it is, letting go of expectations of our own lives is the most important thing that we can do to find true fulfillment in life. Set the goals, have the vision for where an epic life for yourself may lead. But do so with the understanding that the path will be a winding road and not a straight line. Along that path, there may be another destination, not part of the plan, that ends up being beyond even the wildest of dreams. So rather than using phrases like, “Everything will be awesome when…” “If this happens, it will change everything…” “I just need to reach the tipping point…” try “Everything is awesome because…” “Because this is happening, I get to...” “This moment is the tipping point.” Then, the realization may come that letting go leads to the best present, past, and future imaginable.