#84: The underappreciated value of waiting for success
Where did we all get this idea that if we want to succeed, we need to go faster? And that if we haven't succeeded yet, that must mean that we're probably not good enough? Sometimes, the reason we haven't succeeded isn't that we're not good enough, but that we haven't waited long enough. And that means that doing better doesn't necessarily require being better - it means holding on for longer. Swallow your impatience, friends, and gather round to hear about a key to success that is hiding in plain sight.
Here's the tweet by Billy Oppenheimer discussed in the episode.
Episode transcript:
Do you know how to wait for what you want?
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello again, imperfectionists. How have you been doing since the last episode aired, 2 weeks ago? Any impressive wins to report? Any goals hit? Bucket list items ticked off? Dream jobs or qualifications or promotions attained? Have you levelled up? Defeated the boss? Won yet another Nobel Prize? I’m sorry, I’m being a bit cruel here. If you answered ‘yes’ to any of those questions, maybe with accompanying fist-pumps and Tom-Cruise style sofa bouncing, then I’m delighted for you. But for the rest of us, the reality might be far less dazzling. Perhaps you’re thinking, ‘Well, I haven’t actually done anything remarkable in the last two weeks’. Maybe it’s been much longer than that. I’m reminded here of how every time Adie, our window cleaner, comes round - which is every 6 weeks - I’m overcome with the thought, ‘Oh god, another 6 weeks already? And I’ve done NOTHING.’ I mean, it’s never strictly true - I haven’t literally been sitting there doing nothing, watching the windows accumulate cobwebs and cat nose-prints. But still, there’s that uncomfortable sense of time passing at a much faster rate than I’m making progress. And I want to talk to you about that today. I want to question where we all got this idea that progress should be happening at a particular rate, a rate that none of us has bothered to specify in any useful level of detail, but which is definitely much faster than whatever it is that we’re currently managing. Where did we get the idea that the key to success is speeding up? What if, instead, the key to success - one of them, anyway, and whatever ‘success’ means here - is sitting it out, being comfortable with the sometimes uncomfortably slow rate at which things are happening?
I’ve had a tweet on this topic bookmarked for ages, planning to get around to using it as a jumping-off point for a podcast episode. It’s from Billy Oppenheimer, and it’s about Harrison Ford, the actor, who turns out also to be a carpenter. Harrison Ford - and I’m paraphrasing Oppenheimer here - arrived in Hollywood in the mid 1960s, with ambitions to become an actor. He wasn’t the only wannabe actor in Hollywood, of course. He noticed that most people were in a rush to make it. The clock was ticking, and they were falling over themselves to get noticed, make money, hit the big time. Why? Who knows, but probably for similar reasons that you’re always on at yourself about not going fast enough. Harrison Ford was wise enough to question this, and he decided that there was no reason to be in a big rush. He decided to take his time instead. So, he became a carpenter, which gave him a source of income. As the years went by, he watched as one after another of his fellow aspiring actors ran out of energy, gave up, and went home. He bided his time. He ended up doing carpentry work for some big names. And, in the end - well, I don’t need to tell you that carpentry is no longer Ford’s main source of income. There’s more about this story in Billy Oppenheimer’s tweet, which I’ll link to in the episode notes.
What’s the lesson here? Well, one lesson is that that belief that so many of us are committed to - the belief that the faster we go, the more successful we’ll be - is, and I’m going to put this mildly, not necessarily true. Perhaps it’s even false. And perhaps it’s not only false, but also toxic. It certainly didn’t help Harrison Ford’s fellow unknowns make it in Hollywood, back in the day. They were the hares in that race. Ford was the tortoise. Why did they all pack up and go home? I don’t know, of course, but I have a hunch. If they’re anything like some of people I’ve coached over the past few years, their rush to make it eventually morphed into disillusionment. Eventually, when they hadn’t made it, they concluded that it was because they weren’t good enough, and that they’d therefore never make it. Unlike Ford, they didn’t have a Plan B. They might even have viewed having a Plan B as a sign of weakness or lack of commitment. Positive mindset, right? Why start the process thinking ‘I’d better do this other thing just in case I don’t get what I want’. Hardly thinking like a winner, is it?! All of which is a great illustration of how belief in the importance of having the right sort of winner’s mindset can backfire.
Let’s go back to that inference that I mentioned a moment ago. I’m imagining these people as arriving in Hollywood, pumped with excitement and positivity, then running out of energy and concluding ‘I’m not good enough’ and ‘I’ll never make it’. Really weird inferences, when you think about it. I mean where did they - or, for that matter you - get the idea that if they succeed in attaining their goals by date X then they’re good enough, but if not, then they’re not good enough. Where did that date X even come from? Thin air, that’s where. What Ford’s story shows is that being ‘good enough’ is not the point. I mean, sure, I can accept that you need to meet some minimal standard if you want a successful acting career, but there’s no reason at all to conclude that Harrison Ford made it because he was a better actor than those other people. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. What he did have that those other people didn’t was the ability and willingness to wait it out. He was prepared to hold on for longer. He’d set himself up to ensure that he could do that, with his Plan B, his carpentry career. And - crucially - he saw from the outset that there was no relationship between how quickly his success came and how good an actor he was. If he did fall prey to those glum ‘maybe I’m not good enough’ moments, he didn’t let that glum part of himself slide into the driving seat and drive him back to wherever it was he came from. (Chicago, apparently. I just looked it up.) His story, and especially his ability to hold on for longer than his peers, reminds me of those touch-the-car competitions, where a group of people compete to win a car by trying to stay touching it for longer than anyone else. Eventually all but one competitor get bored, fall asleep, or just get really really fed up with touching the car, and give up. The last one touching it is the winner. The winner doesn’t win because they have any covetable skill that the others don’t have. They’re just more stubborn, and better able to sit (or stand) with the often very dull and uneventful stretch of time between when you first set out to achieve something and eventual success.
Now. What would your life be like if you were to give up the belief that success means going faster? And if you were to resist making the inference that your not having succeeded yet means you’re worse than those other people who’ve already made it? These are weird questions, in a way, because I know that you don’t really believe these things. You don’t believe that success is given out in order, based on how talented people are, so that the best one gets what they want first, followed by the next best one, and so on. You know this, even though it often seems like that is exactly how it works, because you have your ear to the ground and you’re acutely, painfully aware of all those times when one of your fellow strivers makes the jump from being unpublished, unemployed, or unrecognised to getting published, landing an amazing job, or getting recognised and celebrated. There’s a selection bias operating here: you hear about the ones who make it, but you don’t hear about the ones who give up and do something else or otherwise fall out of the race. You’re also selective about what you choose to believe. You tell yourself that everyone who is doing better than you is being more productive than you are, and when they tell you otherwise - when they say things like, ‘Oh yeah, I procrastinate all the time too’ - you decide that they’re lying or exaggerating or just taking pity on you and trying to make you feel better. All this dodgy reasoning helps support your commitment to the belief - often in the face of evidence to the contrary - that those who go faster and produce more, succeed first.
As I say, though, you know this already. When I have these discussions in coaching sessions, it’s always the same. People end up sighing and saying variations of ‘Yeah I know that my not having succeeded yet doesn’t mean I’m not good enough, and I know that not everyone who tells me that they procrastinate is lying ’. They know this, but still they don’t wholeheartedly buy into it. Why?
Here’s why. Plenty of smart, ambitious people believe things like ‘I need to go faster and be more productive if I want to succeed’ and ‘I haven’t succeeded yet, therefore maybe I’m just not good enough’ - not because they think these beliefs check out, but because they think they’re useful beliefs to have. They think that questioning and rejecting these beliefs will amount to letting themselves off the hook - honestly, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard that exact expression in coaching sessions. They think that they have to keep yelling at themselves to go faster because if they don’t, their true, lazy slobby personalities - the ones they need to work tirelessly to suppress - will bubble to the surface and stop them attaining their potential. (Remember your slobby personality? I talked about that in episode #62: Guilt! Guilt! Guilt!)
I’ve said before, several times, and I’ll say it again now: just let yourself off the hook. It’s fine. You don’t belong on a hook. Thinking that you do is not helpful, despite what you might think. If I hadn’t ‘let myself off the hook’, so to speak, I would still be working (or avoiding working) on my first book, which was published almost 6 months ago. Keeping yourself on the hook holds you back. It certainly held back all those people who Harrison Ford watched give up on their acting careers.
But our reflections on the Harrison Ford story adds another dimension here. All this agonising about whether it’s helpful or not to beat ourselves up about not going faster and doing more leads us to overlook something very important. We underappreciate the value of being able to tolerate waiting it out and holding on. This can be just as crucial to success as things like talent and skill. The capacity to tolerate waiting a long time for success isn’t especially glamorous or exciting, and it’s not a quality we tend to admire in others, the way we admire talent and skill. But success isn’t just about talent and skill. That’s exactly why not attaining success (yet) doesn’t entail that you’re not talented or skilled. You might be supremely talented and skilled, but if you’re too quick to grow disillusioned and give up, nobody will ever find out.
So, what am I saying here? Never give up? Succeed or die trying? Not at all. Quitting gets a bad rap, but very often quitting is exactly the right thing to do. (This is another topic for a podcast episode I haven’t got around to making yet.) So, how do you know whether to hold out, like Harrison Ford did, or whether to quit, like his fellow aspiring actors who didn’t make it? Simple: do what you like. Or, rather, do what best serves your values. Recognise that there is more than one form of success. It might be tempting to view Ford’s peers who gave up on Hollywood as having failed, but that would be incredibly narrow minded. Who knows what they went on to do? Some might have become successful actors after all, somewhere other than Hollywood. Perhaps others went on to enjoy success in other arenas. Some might not have ended up having what would be conventionally viewed as glamorous or remarkable lives, but they might have found happiness and fulfilment even so. Hardly failures.
Let’s go back to the unhelpful sort of winner’s mindset I described earlier. You know, the idea that having a Plan B is for losers, and the idea that if you’re even going to entertain the idea of not getting what you want then you may as well pack up and go home right now. That’s all bullshit. You can have your cake and eat it here. You can strive for the thing you most want, but plan for not getting it too. You can want the prize yesterday, but you can plan for not getting it this month, this year, or this decade. That doesn’t make you a loser; on the contrary. Nobody thinks Harrison Ford was a loser because he took up carpentry while he was waiting for his big break. But what if you don’t get your big break? Well, you can keep trying, or you can do something else. You can change your mind. Saying ‘This is the thing I want more than anything else in the whole world!’ - but you can recognise that this isn’t set in stone. It’s not just that you can do all these things I’ve mentioned - you should do them. By which I mean, it’s in your best interests to do them. Spend year after year working towards your goal if you like, but pause every 6 months or so to revisit whether it’s still worth the time and energy you’re devoting to it. Perhaps things have changed, and there are other opportunities open to you now. Perhaps you’ve changed, and the goal you were chasing last year isn’t valuable to you the way it used to be. Ask yourself regularly, ‘Given the things I most value, what choices will best serve me?’ The answer might be: continuing to work towards the goal I’ve been aiming for for several years now. But that might not always be the case. You write the rules here.
If there are things about yourself and your progress that disappoint you, I hope that I might have prompted you here to view them in a new light. If you have a tendency to view yourself as unsuccessful in certain respects, I hope you might be able, instead, to entertain the idea that perhaps success is going to take longer than you hoped it would. It’s fine to find that frustrating: none of us likes to have to wait for good things. But it’s a mistake to view it as evidence that you’re flawed. Instead, give some thought to what you might do in the mean time. This isn’t touch-the-car, where you’re standing there waiting, bored out of your skull. It could even be fun. What new projects and opportunities could you explore while you’re working towards your goal?
Next time, friends.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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