What Are You Willing to Do for Fifty Years?

When it comes to training, getting rich, building relationships, or even a career, how long do you need to show up and toil with it? How long, you ask? Well, long enough, of course. In this day an age, the answer is quite often longer than we’re willing to.

Here’s a hint. We’ve always lived in a world where a large body of work paid dividends. Mastery in anything from driving race cars to playing cards has unlimited potential for earnings, joy, and life purpose. As it turns out, there’s more cache to relationships that are going on their twentieth year than relationships that are going on their second; platonic or romantic. Sure, you can come up on a big pay day via lottery or inheritance, but both pale in comparison to a financial fortress built over decades with infrastructure to support itself. Time matters, and I’d argue it always has.

What I’d propose, and others agree, that whereas these large bodies of work and these endless logs of time with a craft are valuable, we’re living in a world in which they are becoming increasingly valuable. Part of the reason for this is the genuine value and opportunity for more expeditious efforts. We are fast these days. Meetings between minds across the world can happen in moments with no money or effort via Skype or iChat. Communication times are distilled down to watching those three little dots that indicate that your person is currently typing and with all the advantages of speed, less and less of us are willing to suck it up in a craft, a relationship, or an investment of any kind for the foreseeable future. I don’t mean the foreseeable millennial future, but the future, like decades.

Now, I’m not here to put down speed and efficiency. I salute it. I’d just like to argue that in 2017 we can be a force to be reckoned with if we master both. Take all the Skype calls on a moments notice with your business partner (who you’ve never met) sitting first-class 30,000 feet above you and sell your six month old tech company for a billion bucks, but also have the ability to enroll yourself in the long road when it comes to relationships, your craft, and your careers. That’s how you create value.

You can get excited about how to get toes-to-bar by Friday. I love it, but let’s also realize that if you aren’t willing to train for the next thirty or fifty years, none of this really matters anyway. Build a ranch, become a wizard on a drum kit, and be a friend for eighty years, then we can talk about value. Our modern world needs it, and so does your fitness, your bank account, your relationship, and your career. Hell, even an idiot can find real greatness spending fifty years in commitment.

 

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach