Along with a lack of patience

You don’t go for one workout and expect to be in perfect shape.

It could be the hardest, most efficient weight-lifting session you’ve ever done, but if you measured the success by how much your body shape has improved from one single workout, you would constantly be disappointed and frustrated.

This is such a simple example and you’re probably thinking “Well duh, that would be ridiculous.” However, we tend to do this in so many different areas of our lives.

Writing is an excellent example and I am guilty of this too. I’ll spend hours making an article amazing with the perfect header and photo, waiting for the reads and follows to flow in.

Then nothing happens.

I wait and still nothing.

I’ll refresh Medium every minute, I mean hour, to see if anybody new stumbled across my article and took the time to read it.

I know it’s not rational, so many factors are out of my control, such as the Medium algorithm, whether or not my usual readers are busy on that specific day, or a hundred other factors I don’t even realize exist.

Yet I still do it.

I’m an obsessive person by nature. I love graphs and statistics, so it’s so tempting for me to constantly check the stats page, expecting a perfect sloped line going up more and more with each article and day that passes.

Unfortunately, that is not how life works.

So to stop torturing myself all the time, I decided to focus on what I can control and that is the process of writing and my belief in myself.

I can control how much hard work I put into things.

I can control how much belief I have that my hard work will pay off.

I can control how much I improve at what I’m doing.

I can control whether or not I will let results define success or if I let my hard work and my improvements define my success.

So I will leave you with this.

The metric by which you determine success should be something you can control, not something that is affected by a ton of variables outside of your control.

Measure success in a way that truly matters, and learn to enjoy the process of whatever you’re doing.

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