Jargogled Impressions.

“To be brave cheerily, to be patient with a glad heart, to stand the agonies of thirst with laughter and song, to walk beside death for months and never be sad – that’s the spirit that makes courage worth having.” Ernest Shackleton

At what point do we realize that we should give up versus continue on a path that is not working out for us? What are the indications that lets us be confident of our decision to do so, and counteracts the desires and ambitions that go with it? Surely, there was a reason why we started on the journey in the first place, and therefore, it stands to reason that we hoped to get something out of it. Courage, as the quote above highlight, is about our ability to brave through the agonies 

For most times, I suppose we gauge whether or not we are at least somewhat closer to our goals. That is, we try to understand if we have made any progress at all or most of our efforts have been redundant, or even regressing.

The measurement of progress is an art, and one that is influenced by seen and unseen forces. If we are not careful enough, we let those hidden forces influence how and what we are measuring in terms of progress and arrive at a decision. When these hidden forces turn out to be true, as can be the case when these motives or intentions are in fact discovered by way of the pursuit itself, then we are golden. But when they are mimetic and face off with our authentic self, then they present challenges – both of backwards looking, and forward-looking kind. 

Backward looking, because we end up regretting the decision to leave the pursuit in the messy middle stage. Forward looking, because we rue what could have been if indeed, we had gritted our path forward regardless of the signals or the challenges. 

If you follow certain podcasts that glorify founders and entrepreneurs and solo-businessmen and such, you’d find one common refrain that goes with what made them successful – which is to be trawl through shit in order to succeed. Go through a lot of sucky situations and challenges and near-death scenarios before you emerge victorious. There is no such thing as an overnight success and that what you see when you meet successful people is just the tip of the iceberg and much lies underneath, built painstakingly through the myriad decision-points that came in their way when they could have easily folded their bags and left whatever it was they were doing. But they persisted, and rose up to the challenge, in fact relished the challenge and turned more of their psychic energy towards it. 

Grit and perseverance – a lot can be accomplished if you demonstrate these. You may not get to the original destination you had in mind, but you will have traveled a fair mile regardless. Which is to say, that the outcome – driven by factors external to us, is a matter of luck and chance, and million little pieces coming neatly together. But to be able to tap into the same requires the effort and the concentrated attention that not many are able to muster. 

Most of these decision points to persevere happens when you collide with an obstacle like decelerated progress, external pushback, ridicule, embarrassment, etc. They become the founding stones for what is commonly referred to as the messy middle when all your plans become toast, and you’re thinking becomes muddled with too many details – seemingly disparate and incoherent, and the world seems to be working against you, mocking you and pointing fingers at your naivete. Perseverance is not just the ability to work hard physically, or being able to have an active analytical mind day in and day out. Perseverance is as psychological game as it can be in that it requires a mental fortitude to block all unwanted thoughts, to discard all external scorns, to let of ego and embarrassment in order to really follow through on your goals. It’s what Arjun possesses when he sees the bird on the tree. 

Arjun aimed to focus on the skills and not on the outcomes. He fretted about the implications of the outcomes, immortalized in the Gita, but never about the glory of it. And in his psyche lies the answer to the questions that dog the xx society we live in today. 

In every aspect of our lives, whether chasing big dreams or small, whether chasing external validation or internal confirmation, whether approaching a destination or making plans to approach one, we encounter the decision milestones that decide which way we will proceed. In the thousands of tiny decisions, we take on how to spend our time, where to draw our psychic energy towards, how to engage and act – we meet with factors that influence what and how we make a decision. And given the enormity of it, the complexity of it, and the insanity of being 100% in the know – we feel ill-equipped to manage it. 

The best way we can and should approach it, is to chunk out the decisions to smaller parts. To focus more on the immediate and the here, instead of worrying about the outcome or the destination. As we say when running marathons, just take the next step instead of worrying about the 26.1 miles lying ahead of you. With each small step that we take, we get ourselves closer to the goal. When we start worrying about if we are fit enough to run the whole hog, what will the weather let us do, how will others outcompete us in this marathon, what would the road elevations look like, etc. we do ourselves a disfavor by overburdening our minds. These are good questions to ask, just not the right time to ask them. 

In Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, the emphasis on an intensely personal self-discovery is brilliantly highlighted. It’s a message that we often forget in the thick of things and when we are confronted with challenges that makes us impatient and anxious. But every journey is and needs to be intensely personal and heavily customized. You may take inputs from those you admire, but these serve merely as maps, and they are not the territory itself. And the milestones in each journey is, by design, different. Know this before you take your next decision, lest you unwittingly commit yourself to something you do not identify with in the first place.