Previously in The Appetite of Success I shared the pathway to becoming an achiever. For the sake of brevity, I omitted two crucial elements, which will be dealt with here. If you haven’t read The Appetite of Success, I would strongly recommend doing that first.
If you recall, we looked at the journey from Newbie to Achiever, following the Motivated Equilibrium line. (Refresher image below:)
The journey, as we discovered, was a series of increasingly challenging goals, causing us to develop our skills further. Each of these becomes a step along the path. But in this case, “step” is a literal translation.
The staircase we see is our skills building to surpass each new challenge we set before us. Each step pushes the boundaries of current achievement, the Motivated Equilibrium line, then we continue to grow our skills incrementally before taking the next challenging stair up the staircase. As we take each new step, conquer each new challenge, we gain a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. This feeling of accomplishment helps us look towards the next step, and grants us the perseverance to stick with our craft, building more skills to take us to new heights.
When taking stairs, in life and in our metaphorical sense, too many stairs at one time will leave you stumbling. This is why you cannot simply jump up entire staircases. Nor can you build skill and charge up too many steps at once, as fatigue will set in and cause you to falter.
And faltering brings us to our next crucial element, landings. Not all skills and endeavors are destined to bring us to greatness. Indeed, we need to focus on just a few core staircases that lead us to our highest levels of achievement and success. That means some of our areas of interest we need to either abandon, or at least hold at a level that is acceptable. Let us quickly define acceptable in the instance of this article as: the point where desire equals effort + time. The landing we hold should maintain our desired skills without costing too much effort and time. If it costs more time and effort than we want (desire) to dedicate, then we need to scale back to a landing that is comfortable.
Landings require some effort to maintain our skill level, but we are no longer devoting extra time and effort to grow our skill base. This means we are holding skills constant without striving for achievement in this area of focus. To tie this back to our guitar playing example, progressing along our motivated equilibrium between challenge and skill, but recognize that we would rather be an exceptional <insert profession here> mother, father, teacher, athlete, entrepreneur, lawyer, developer, salesperson, etc. Our efforts should be focused on that staircase, but since guitar playing is still important, we need to continue to practice to maintain our skills. Instead of playing Through the Fire and the Flames by DragonForce, perhaps we’re comfortable strumming out some Beatles around a summer campfire. This means we still need to practice, but to a lesser extend, freeing up time and energy to continue along the path of who we truly want to be. To thrive, to continue to climb upwards along your chosen staircase that is important to you.