Effort – How to Take Control of your Life.

Effort – How to Take Control of your Life.

For the past few days, I have tinkered around with the idea of what it means to put a lot of effort into a particular thing and see it yield results – good or bad. In trying to untangle this thought, I quickly came to realize that our lives are nothing without the effort we put into them. Think about all of the big things you have achieved today and you will quickly realize the same.

Effort is an onward or upward motion, movement, or action against stagnation. You should by now have learnt that if you want anything, you have to go for it. For instance, while in school, if you needed to get a score, you would do all it takes to get it. If you need help, you know who to go to. In essence, to achieve a thing, we need to move from where we are to get what it is we want.

Hence, effort is the act of moving your ideas in a particular direction whether right or wrong. Now, effort is not success. Effort does not determine success. However, effort can lead to success in the same way it can lead to failure. The beautiful thing about effort however is the progress it brings your way. It easily takes you from level 1 to level 1.5 whether the outcome is good or bad.

What this means is that the reward for effort is not success or failure. The reward for effort is experience. The outcome of effort – whether good or bad – is that it adds to your portfolio of experience. Experience in return builds a repository of knowledge – knowledge of what worked or did not and why. This, my friend, is what progress in life means.

Effort is sexy because putting in the effort is how you take control of your life. Making the effort to be a better version of yourself rather than glorifying your flaws and shortcomings is very sexy. Putting the effort to develop a particular skill set is beautiful to see. Putting the effort to make your relationship work – to love and to commit to your partner is very sexy.

However, effort can be a curse. You can put in effort in doing the wrong things. You may put the effort into glorifying your flaws rather than becoming a better version of yourself. It is also possible that you put the effort into complaining rather than taking charge of your life. You can put the effort into being a terrible partner rather than the opposite.

Maybe putting in the effort is not the problem. The problem could be what you are putting your effort into which I think is another conversation for another day. But for today, I hope that you take control of your life by putting in the effort.