In most of our endeavours, there’s a gap between where we currently are and where we’d like to be.
And when it comes to bridging that gap, we’ve got a reliable approach we come back to, time and again…
Putting the work in.
Yes: put an obstacle in front of us that threatens to derail our progress, and most people will rise to the challenge.
Hackles up, energy up, commitment up, we push through.
And when we arrive on the other side, we’re energised.
We ride that wave of momentum until the next roadblock appears…
And then the process begins all over again.
It’s a cyclical, circular process – one that plays out across all the domains and planes we operate in.
Where there’s work to be done, we’ll find people doing it: no questions asked.
But is this a good thing?
Is a desire to push through and a need to conquer the obstacle a beneficial – or even necessary – part of our journey?
Perhaps. Like everything else, it depends. There’s nuance. General answers only have limited value in a specific context.
But as elusive as silver-bullet paradigms are, determining the perfect approach (finding the right answer) isn’t really the point.
There’s value in asking these questions, even if we don’t necessarily know how to respond to them…
Because it’s only by asking that clarity emerges.
In that spirit, some food for thought:
Our desire to overcome and progress is much a bane as it is a boon in certain situations.
Improvement is only a worthy goal when something is worth improving in the first place.
Not everything is life is designed to be maximised, streamlined, or made more efficient.
Some things shouldn’t be done at all.
Others are best appreciated for what they are.
Some factors are entirely out of our control, and the only thing we can do is manage our response to them as best we can.
The desire for continuous, never-ending improvement might be a noble call to ongoing refinement in our pursuit of things we care about.
But in a vacuum, is it any better than baseline contentment? Default happiness? Where we’re sufficiently satisfied by how things are that we don’t need them to change in order to feel good about them?
It’s possible that work is required. That the obstacle is the problem. That when you vault over it and land on the other side, you’ll be in a whole new place – somewhere quantifiably better than where you stand today.
It’s also possible that our perception is the problem.
That what looks like an obstacle to one person is just a feature of the journey to another.
And that the yawning void inside us demanding progress at all costs isn’t an appetite we can ever satisfy.