Every other magazine cover you see promises you the secret to quick success. Inspired by this, you try to Have Killer Abs in Six Weeks while Turning Your Hobby Into A Lucrative Career while Having Great Sex (wait, that combination might actually work). But when success doesn’t arrive on schedule you turn to self loathing and Ring Dings. What no one tells you about success is that the path sucks. It’s often miserable and worse yet, boring. If the path to success were a training montage there would be fewer failures.
Instead of denying this grim reality you should lean into it. Embrace the suck. You must recognize the fact of the misery of the task and accept it. Your life will be a grueling grind for the foreseeable future until you have succeeded in your goal, at which point you exchange the old suck for a new one. The suck of graduate school gives way to the suck of your new professional life. The suck of earning your blue belt in Jiu-Jitsu is replaced by the suck of getting instantly tapped by black belts now that you are allowed to roll with them. The suck of being single gives way to the suck of being in a relationship. There is no magic breakthrough to happiness, because once you achieve your goal you set a new one. This is the Jacob’s Ladder of success, where each new rung feels good only for a short time before you are at the bottom of a new climb. It gets better, and harder, from there.
That is the way of success. Or to be all Eastern and enlightened and stuff, that is The Way. Embrace the suck, Grasshopper.