What’s The Achievement Puzzle?

Is The Fastest Route A Straight Line?

We are led to believe that the fastest route between two points is a straight line.

Using this reasoning, then to achieve something efficiently it’s just a matter of mapping the shortest route between the starting point and the desired outcome. Then completing the required action until you get to the desired outcome.

The overnight success is held up as the benchmark to follow and we then start comparing ourselves to others.

What if the overnight success was a myth and there were actually many years of preparation in getting to the point of where “success” can be proclaimed.

When trying to emulate the process of getting from point A to point B as quickly as possible, how much stress is generated when there are delays and other setbacks in acquiring the goal?

From my experience when the desired outcome is achieved after following this model, there are often three things that unexpectantly occur as a result.

The achieved goal doesn’t meet the expectations you had anticipated it would provide when you embarked upon it.
You are not equipped with the skills and/or understanding to really benefit from the acquired goal.
You are left feeling unfulfilled, and you feel the need to set off chasing some other goal that promises you the fulfillment that this goal didn’t provide.

The Path To Success Is A Winding One

What if the route was always meant to be one that was slower and winding with challenges, and to have supposed distractions dotted along the way? That is, if there is a large disparity, between where you are currently, and the goal that you are setting out to achieve.

What if the challenges and distractions were there actually to help you to refine and recalibrate your desired goal, and educate you in preparation to better appreciate and utilise the goal when it’s achieved?

If this is true, would you view of the challenges, obstacles, and other things faced on the journey towards acquiring the goal change?

Would you view challenges more as the means to provide you with your right of passage to success with your goal?

“There are no straight lines in Success.”

Dr. Barry Morguelan

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A Slower Path Can Be Faster

Growing up I was always in a constant rush to get things done as a result I learnt how to get things done quickly, at least I thought I was.

As I got older, I could see patterns emerging in the things I was completing quickly.

I frequently noticed a lack of any sense of any real personal fulfilment or achievement when I had completed something quickly. It just marked an endpoint before I would then would feel compelled like a Leeming to tear off in the pursuit of something else to complete.

The most significant and the hardest for me to accept was those who I knew who took longer to complete similar things. That they seemed to develop a much deeper knowledge and level of wisdom acquired in the process of completing it. Also what they produced seemed to me to be much better quality.

Learning from Challenges and Obstacles

But the thing that really got my attention was they didn’t seem to face the same challenges and obstacles in the future and if they did, they didn’t seem as challenging for them.

Whereas at the time for me, the same challenges and obstacles would keep reoccurring, it was as though I wasn’t learning the lessons and constantly needed to retake the exam. So, while others seemed to be moving more slowly, they were actually making more progress that me.

This realisation was what really got my attention to slow down, and to really understand what the lesson behind the obstacles and challenges was when they occurred, so that over the long term, I would make more progress. Not to be constantly like a duck, who’s paddling madly below the surface and yet above the surface not really making much progress.

Over the years I have accumulated many of the pieces of the puzzles that I have spent time working on. What constantly excites and amazes me is when I find that one of the pieces from one puzzle that I have been working on, when turned on to a different angle also fits perfectly into another puzzle.

I’m now increasingly finding that individual puzzles I have been working on are in fact just pieces of a much larger puzzle.