Becoming a Person Who Shines on Their Own

The illusion that it’s easy

There’s really nothing new about how to do something properly. Keep at it, don’t give up, do it right. That’s pretty much all there is. But most people either can’t stick to it even though they know it, or they deliberately look the other way and go looking for an easier path.

I don’t think people are weak-willed. If anything, it’s closer to the truth that they can’t keep to those basics because keeping to them is genuinely hard. Doing something once is so obvious and so easy that it’s tempting to underrate it, but doing that same thing consistently is harder than you’d ever imagine.

For most things in life, trying it out for about a week tells you nothing — you can never know in advance how much effort the coming years will actually demand. And I think a lot of people, convinced they can pull it off, underrate the right path while overrating themselves.

Seeing things at their actual size

I listed underrating and overrating separately, but they’re really the same thing. In the end it comes down to not seeing things as they actually are. People tend to see in whatever direction is easiest for them, so the work looks more manageable than it really is and their own ability looks more impressive than it really is. That’s how you end up thinking “oh, I could knock that out in no time” — and both halves of that judgment are wrong for the same reason.

And there’s usually one more piece that gets tacked on: seeing what others have achieved as smaller than it really is, too. Cutting other people down and puffing yourself up are actually the same move — if you decide someone’s accomplishment was just luck, or no big deal, then you look that much bigger by comparison. So these three always travel together. I look big, the work and other people look small, and every one of those distortions points toward whatever feels comfortable right now.

I don’t think this is really about being emotional. Nudging your view toward the comfortable side is close to something people just can’t help doing; it’s only that the judgments you make from that distorted state don’t hold up. So before starting anything, the first thing you need isn’t some great act of will — it’s to put back into place the things you’d been inflating and shrinking, and take another look.

A shortcut leaves nothing behind

Once you start seeing things inflated like this, the shortcut is what your hand naturally reaches for. The work looks manageable and you look capable, so there seems to be no reason to take the long way around. Looking the other way and going for the easy path usually starts right here.

The shortcut itself isn’t the problem, really. The problem is that a shortcut chosen this way wasn’t chosen because it would actually work — it was chosen because it merely looked easy. You never saw how things really stood, so it usually doesn’t pan out, and this is exactly where the shortcut splits decisively from the proper path. Someone who walked the proper path still has what they built along the way, even if they didn’t reach the goal — but a shortcut skips the building part by definition, so when it fails, nothing is left.

And then there’s nothing to stand on to start over. When that single failure starts to feel like it says something about your whole life, that’s where the dark begins.

I’ve been trapped there too

I was trapped in that dark for a few years in my late twenties. At the time it felt like the world had ended, but looking back it was the kind of thing you could fully recover from.

I already knew which path was the right one, even then. Consistently, properly, over time. It was never a matter of not knowing. It’s just that knowing something and holding out at it for years are completely different things.

The despair itself wasn’t wrong. It was the natural feeling to have in that situation. If there was one thing I got wrong back then, it wasn’t the emotion — it was the size of the failure. For someone measuring against only three years, a two-year failure looking like almost your entire life is only natural.

So what knocked me down wasn’t not knowing the path — it was the ruler I was measuring that size with. The same failure, set against twenty years, becomes just a stretch you pass through. What happened stays the same, the way I react to it stays the same, and yet the feeling changes completely. Getting out of the dark, in the end, wasn’t about finding some new answer — it was about first setting the ruler straight so I could walk the path I’d known all along.

Stretch the timeframe and the goal grows

So these days I’ve reset the ruler to a longer one. Setting a long timeframe changes two things.

One is that I can finally use that obvious answer I mentioned. Keeping at it and not giving up are things that only work if you have time, so with a short timeframe they’re useless no matter how correct they are. Give yourself plenty of time, and these methods finally become something you can actually grab hold of.

The other is that the goal actually gets bigger. If anything, long-term thinking sounds like it should make you slacker, but it’s the opposite. If you only put up the things doable within three years, the goal gets trimmed to fit that box — and there isn’t much that’s truly impressive among the things you can pull off in three years. If you can spend ten, the whole level of goals you’re able to aim for rises.

So lately I’ve been using ten years out as my reference point. The version of me I want to be in ten years — I’ve set that not at just a little better than now, but pretty high.

How do you hold out for ten years

The catch is that you have to hold out for exactly that long.

The things that pile up slowly don’t hand you any real reward along the way. You can pour in half a year and see no visible result, and you can’t even confirm whether you’re on the right track. A shortcut, by comparison, at least answers you quickly. It tells you fast whether you were right or wrong, so it’s relatively less nerve-wracking.

And then this question eventually comes up: is spending ten whole years on this really worth it? It’s not the kind of question you can push down by steeling yourself, so as the stretch without visible results drags on, it keeps coming back.

Someone who got there first

Faced with that question, I try to imagine something. If I pour a solid ten years into it starting now, what will I look like at the end? But when I just picture it in my head alone, it doesn’t come into focus. I think it’s because it’s a span of time I haven’t lived through yet.

So instead I look at someone who’s already there. Someone about ten years older than me, who used that time well and became admirable. When I look at a person like that, I find myself thinking, without even trying, that they’re impressive, that I’d like to end up like them. And that becomes the answer. My judging that person to be admirable means that if I reach roughly that point in ten years, the me back then won’t consider this time wasted either. I can’t ask the ten-years-from-now me directly, but I can ask by proxy, using someone already ten years ahead as the reference.

Which, come to think of it, ties back to what I said earlier. This method only works if you can judge others properly. Someone who habitually cuts down what others have achieved will look at such a person and brush it off as no big deal too — and then there’s no one left to use as a reference. Seeing other people fairly comes back around, in the end, to lighting your own path forward.

And here age doesn’t really matter. Whether that person is ten years older than me or twenty, it made no difference to my seeing them as admirable. If age were the sticking point, older people should have looked less admirable, and they didn’t. So there’s no reason for me to sit here going on about how it’s already too late at my age.

Not making others the measure

That said, seeing others fairly and making them my measure are two somewhat different things.

When you think short-term, you keep ending up making others the measure. You can’t stop paying attention to who’s ahead right now, roughly what place you’re in — I think it’s because with a short timeframe, comparing yourself to others is the only way to check where you stand. Since there’s no immediate result, you measure by your distance from other people instead.

But when you think long-term, this stops working. The version of me I want to be in ten years isn’t something others can set for me, and whether the person next to me is ahead of me right now or not has little to do with my ten-years-out. There’s nothing much to gain from comparing. So I acknowledge what others have achieved for what it is, but where I stand right now, I measure against my own reference rather than against them.

That’s why I don’t really pay much mind to what others think. Not because I’ve become a better person, but because there’s not much to gain from minding it.

You don’t shine by trying to shine

What I’ve held on to, in deciding to walk this again, comes down to this: see things as they actually are, set my own timeframe and goal from there, and hold consistently to the methods that fit that standard. Then even if I fail, something remains; because something remains, I can keep going; and as I keep going, at some point the measure of judgment shifts from others over to me.

In the end, what matters isn’t which path you chose. Whether you take the shortcut or the long, hard road — a person who looks honestly at their own situation, sets a standard of their own, and holds to it consistently. A person like that looks like they shine, even from the outside. Not because they’re trying to shine, but because a state of not wavering is just what it looks like from the outside.

The people I saw as admirable were probably the same. They didn’t get to where they are by calculating how they’d look to others — it’s closer to the truth that they just kept to their own standard for a long time, and ended up looking that way as a result.

I knew all along that this path was the right one. Once, I hit the wall of reality and sat down — but this time I know why it’s hard, and I know what happens if you break. So I’m going again. Ten years is longer than you’d think, and I’ve only just stepped back up to the starting line.