Success leaves clues they say. There’s a recipe for success. The recipe calls for the right skill set, a specific mindset, grit, and perseverance. If you follow the recipe you will bake up success.
Yet, time is also an ingredient required for such success. I’m not referring to the amount of time you put it. I’m not talking about working out for an hour everyday or working on your business for five hours every night. I’m talking about the time you don’t control.
If you plant a tomato seed today, tomorrow you will simply see dirt. Perhaps you will water the dirt and put down some fertilizer. The following day you will yet again only see dirt. Time is an ingredient. And you don’t control time.
You cannot make a seed sprout into a plant nor can you make a plant break ground. You can create the right environment for it to do so, but you can’t MAKE it. You might be thinking, “I can MAKE a seed turn into a plant and break ground by watering it and fertilizing it.” Again I repeat you alone cannot make a seed turn into a harvest. Some seeds are duds. You plant them, water them, put them in the right amount of sunlight and nothing happens. How do you explain that?
You have to give the seed what it needs and trust that it knows how and when to sprout into a plant and break ground. But you don’t control what the seed nor what time does.
Let’s say the tomato plant needs a gallon of water every week over the course of twelve weeks in order for the plant to grow. If you try to rush time by giving the plant twelve gallons of water in one day or even one week it will not work.
Time is an ingredient. And you simply do not control time.
If you have put together all the right ingredients: skills, knowledge, mindset, action, grit, discipline and yet you still do not have success it is probably because time is not done baking.
That’s why I don’t fall under the philosophy of “grinding” or working 20 hours a day. Doing what? Watching the scale to see if it’s going down? Should I be staring at my web analytics or refreshing my download stats every five minutes? It’s as silly as watching a cake bake or staring at the dirt covering the seed waiting for the plant to sprout up.
Of course if you have specific, value-add actions you can be taking do it. Grind. But if you are working simply for working’s sake – stop.
Time is an ingredient. Unlike the cake box there is no predetermined baking time in life. Perhaps there’s rules of thumb that you can leverage depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, but you simply cannot control time. You can influence time. You can hurry it along a bit, but you don’t control it.
I saw a conversation on social media where a woman said she needed to monetize her blog asap or else she risked being homeless. A man replied and said something to the effect of, “You cannot monetize a blog overnight. It takes time and money and generally more time than money.”
He said basically what I’m saying here. Whether you are losing weight, saving money, or building a business time needs time to do its perfect work. Time is an ingredient you cannot leave out nor substitute.