There Are No Shortcuts

Advice my 20-something self could have used but would never have listened to

Photo by Harald Hagenaars on Unsplash

You can see the finish line. It’s your dream state, your best life; it’s the place you want to be. You just know when you make it there, you won’t have a persistent knot in your back, all your relationships will be smooth like butter, and happiness will never fade while negativity will. Completely.

As your dreamy images of falling asleep on a beach on a weekday, cutting the ribbon for your IPO on the Nasdaq, watching your name climb the best-sellers list on NYT, walking out of a job forever, or sipping wine with a sunset view of the rolling fields of Tuscany are slowly replaced by whatever your current reality is, you feel a pang of yearning.

Why can’t I just be there now??

So, you want to climb a mountain?

Seeing the picture-perfect summit above us but feeling so far away, it’s understandable to feel reluctance or even dread. It’s understandable to want a chairlift to take us there, or a helicopter, or even a lucky, well-timed tornado. 

Regardless of the method, we are faced with the inescapable reality that to get to the summit, one way or another, we must cover the distance between. Step by baby step, we have to move through every inch between here and there.

Don’t get me wrong, this is no ode to “hustle-culture.” This is not a reminder that you can only make progress by “staying on the grind.”

This is a reminder (to myself as much as anyone) that progress takes time and effort.

Build Skills

If you want to climb a mountain, consider what skills you are going to need. You may need a good sense of direction, the ability to walk for many miles, maybe some bouldering ability to scramble over the rough patches, and the strength to push yourself onward. 

Every skill we have was not available to us at one point in time. We were not born walking, much less scaling entire mountains; we have to build our muscles over time to take on huge goals.

In life, we need any number of skills to climb our metaphorical mountains. Do we want to launch an app? We’ll need to learn how to code or pitch our idea to someone who can. Is your dream to day-trade? We’re going to need to understand the patterns and vernacular of the investment world. Want to retire in Tuscany? Time to learn Italian. 

Acquiring skills is time (and effort) intensive, but necessary. To improve our speed at building skills, we can learn to learn, and hone the skill of discerning which skills to pick up in the first place.

Build Resources

If we want to take a helicopter up the mountain, we will need to get a helicopter. Either we have to build it ourselves or buy one, which will take a different set of resources entirely. 

If the time and effort to get a helicopter is too great, what other tools are available? Do we need new shoes, a guide, a backpack? Gathering the right tools and assets can give us a faster, smoother track up our metaphorical mountain, and the time to retrieve, train, and use them must be factored into our journey. 

In life, we might need to build financial resources to launch a business or a new career. We need to build strong connections to find partnerships we can support and use for support. We have to carve out and defend hours to spend on our path to the summit of our daydreams. 

Resources help us move more quickly when we have them, but until we can reliably win the lottery, we will need time to build our capital, whether financial, relational, or other. 

Build Habits

In our desire to get to the top of a mountain, it’s tempting to maximize our speed. Sprinting up a mountain is a quick way to run out of breath, however, and if we want to be able to move faster more consistently, we have to nurture our endurance.

Delaying gratification, pushing our capabilities beyond our comfort zone, and creating supporting habits like a good diet and efficient sleep schedules are all important ways to increase our endurance. 

Just like our physical bodies, we also have to find a good diet for our minds. This means digesting “soul food,” whether that is reading sci-fi novels in a bathtub, taking sommelier classes, painting canvases we will never show the world, or any other activity that brings us into a flow state. Without filling our tanks, we can’t hope to keep moving and risk far more damaging burnout.

Like the efficiencies to be gained with skills and resources, there is a time-based cost to developing new habits. Once we ingrain these habits, we move faster and faster with lower risk of injury or burnout.

Establishing habits is a repetitive and often tedious process, however, and progress feels so incremental it’s hard to notice. We will be consistently tempted to abandon the practice and just sprint up the mountain to feel like we’re making progress. 

Having the patience to diligently train habits can pay large dividends down the road, but there’s no reason we should not give ourselves the short term wins we seek while creating them. This is where gamification and accountability coaching can come in to help us stay on track with long term goals that we know will take time to sprout.

Build Experience

The best way to learn something is to apply it or teach it (which is arguably just another form of applying it). Experience is the best teacher, and we know this implicitly. No one expects to read books on golf, watch Tiger Woods play a few times, then golf 18 holes under par the first time we pick up a club. If we want to improve at anything, we have to apply what we learn. Repeatedly.

Experience, by its very nature, requires time. As nice as it would be, we do not have all the knowledge we need when we start. 

We cannot be effective leaders without the experience of leading people (and receiving feedback). We can’t write efficient code without creating many projects. We can’t master a craft without deliberate experimentation.

Often “experience” is just a more pleasant word for “messing it up many times.” Mistakes are our greatest teachers, if we are willing to face them. Doing that requires vulnerability and a growth mindset, having faith that short term pain will have long term rewards.

The more experiences we have, the more we become aware of context. 

When we are climbing a mountain, experience teaches us which rock walls we can scale and which to avoid. As we develop our approach, we begin to appreciate the additional context of our actions. While climbing our mountain, what’s the weather like? Is there enough light to see what we need to see? How tired are we and would it be better to rest before taking the next steps? Incremental challenge and application expands our vault of experiences that guide better decisions along our journey. This is the fundamental capability of the malleable human brain, and it is the basis of all hope for a better future.

Consider becoming an entrepreneur. There are no shortcuts in learning to be a leader, a founder, or a vision-builder. We have to experience it for ourselves. We might jump in at any time in life, either building experiences through careers and jobs before we start something on our own, or jumping in right away and having to learn the lessons along the way. 

To borrow a common start-up metaphor, we often build the plane while it’s already flying. 

As we can imagine, gaining experience is more intense when we jump in directly rather than build experience tangentially first, but this is the closest we can come to a shortcut - jam-packing “practice” into high-pressure, novel, sink-or-swim situations. We can definitely develop quickly under these circumstances, but we should not be blind to the effort it will take.

When I started my career as a consultant, I discovered this first-hand. I joined a firm that proudly claimed they would take anyone who worked with them for 3 years and trust them to compete with people who had worked 10 years in other firms.

Perfect, I thought naively. This was exactly what an ambitious new-grad wanted to hear, this was my shortcut. A couple years later, a more experienced coworker gently laughed at my gaunt expression of exhaustion.

“It sounds great in the beginning, but what they don’t tell you is you will have 10 years of experience crammed into 3.”

There are no shortcuts. It’s ok to practice patience rather than feeling inadequate or assuming we should have been on the summit by now.