Dedicated Time and Dedicated Effort are required for Worthwhile Ventures

In a previous post, "Things Take Time," I noted that although it can be frustrating, it is essential to accept the fact that projects naturally require patience and sustained effort before they show good results. I recognized that things take their own time to be completed, therefore keeping at them is worthwhile. Instant gratification is a myth/persistence and patience are important.

Today, I'm reminded of that post as I stay up late to work on something important that kept getting moved to the back burner (and/or off the stove completely) because even though it is important, it rarely became urgent. (BTW, it's still not urgent yet, but the pressure is definitely on and heating up very quickly. Otherwise, I probably would have brushed it aside again today.)

This time though, as I watch my process, I notice a subtle difference…In my initial post, I was mostly aware of the fact that it is worth keeping at something until it is completed even if it seems to take longer than it feels like it ought to. The emphasis was on the fact that any process necessarily requires its own measure of time to be completed. For example, we can't control how long it takes for bread to bake, plants to grow, or a checkbook to balance, we just need to allow for that amount of time.

This task I'm doing now is demanding not just patience and persistence (time based phenomena), but INVESTMENT (an effort/energy based phenomena—egads* this is not just asking for my faith in an external entity, it is asking for my own blood). I'm needing to set aside and dedicate time and energy for it. Time that is otherwise not available, and time that must be taken away from other priorities (e.g. sleep—I love few things more than my sleep). In light of this, I revise my previous post to "All Things Take Time and Worthy Things Deserve Dedicated Time," or "not only is instant gratification a myth, immaculate gratification is a myth too—persistence and patience are important and so are effort and investment."


Note to Nameless Daughter: Investing yourself, your energy, and your time will not diminish your resources or drain your energy, it will provide a good return, especially if the project is well chosen and important to you.


*(btw, I'm not lazy, but I am naturally very stingy with putting forth any effort beyond what comes easily—yeah, that sure sounds lazy, but, truly, it's more like "effort-shy." Point of background: For years (especially my formative years) I operated under the fallacy that my efforts were not meaningful, and therefore could never be rewarding. Now that I'm more fully aware that this isn't necessarily a law of nature, just a twisted law of my dysfunctional family-of-origin, I am unlearning patterns set around this misassumption that "no effort is a worthy effort" and that "only fools put forth an effort because 1) you are not going to get what you want, and 2) it is asking for serious trouble to be seen wanting." It is elementary to a fortunate number of people, but it is revolutionary to me that my efforts are indeed worth putting forth and that I won't be burned by doing so.)