Taking bins out makes you successful
Doing repetitive stuff, repetitively, is what makes you great
I was doing some adulting. Also known as taking the bins out.
A weekly routine shared by adults, and their children wherever possible, the world over.
Much of what we do in life is repetitive. Some repetitive things, like taking the bins out, we do out of responsibility. Others, such as prayer, we do for ritual. Then there are things like exercise, that fit somewhere in the middle.
Finding joy in such repetition can be a challenge.
A holiday helps to mix it up, but it doesn't take long after returning home for the reality of routine to return. Back into life as usual. Back into adulting.
That is life.
Taking the bins out reminded me of the Zen proverb:
The novice says to the master, “What does one do before enlightenment?”
“Chop wood. Carry water” replies the master.
“What, then, does one do after enlightenment?”
“Chop wood. Carry water.”
Something similar can be said of what it takes to have a successful career.
I mean career in the broadest sense of the word. It could be as an investor, a business owner or employee, a professional athlete or musician. It doesn’t matter.
Success requires putting in the laps, the reps, the scales, or whatever your profession’s equivalent is, and doing so with such attention to detail in making refinements, your skill level gradually yet inevitably improves towards perfection. Practice makes perfect.
As a friend of mine, Thomas Murrell, recently put it, “there is no shortcut to success”.
Couple this with Mark Manson’s complementary view, that being successful is “consistently doing the boring, mundane things everyone knows about but is too unfocused/undisciplined to do”, and we can conclude:
You can’t avoid doing boring things if you want to be successful.
It’s been argued that having meaningful goals enables you to not feel bored, doing the so-called boring things. I call bullshit. A sense of meaning attached to a task enables you to forge ahead despite the boredom. To feel the discomfort of boredom and keep going. To “feel the fear and do it anyway”, so to speak.
Be that to avoid a smelly house by taking the bins out, chop the wood and carry the water to serve the community, or regularly analyse your social media stats to improve your reach. Whatever boring thing/s you need to do, you’ve just gotta do it.
So, the real ticket to success: Be boring.
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