At my first job out of college, I used to hate coming into work. For a while I struggled. I took other interviews. People told me, “You have to do your first year somewhere.”
The philosophy that turned things around was this: whatever it was before that led to this, sitting in my desk at the office, doesn’t matter now. My friends making six-figures doing banking, doesn’t matter. The startup that wants to hire me on to build out their sales org, doesn’t matter. The trip I’ve always dreamed of taking, being an expat in Spain like Hemingway, doesn’t matter.
When I step into the office at my inside sales role at a big tech company, everything else doesn’t matter. I’ll be in my desk for 8 hours no matter what and the outcome is binary—I can work with the tools and situation I’ve got and get better for whatever that’s worth; or I can worry about everything else that I haven’t executed on for whatever reason and not get better where I’m at presently.
The same applies for relationships (“love the one you’re with”), working out (don’t text while you’re in the gym), meditation (sit still and don’t get distracted), etc. Focus fully on what’s in front of you. Block out everything else.
On the scale of a lifetime it’s the same thing, too. If you can’t come in on just one workday committed to hitting daily goals (whether you agree with them or not) and focusing where you’re at now (with what you’ve been given), then you sure as heck won’t be able to achieve your goals over the much more strenuous and long-term frame of a lifetime.
And maybe you were born running to catch your dreams but instead snared demons caught you and taugh you that there is a time to grow up. So you start learning to accept the little things that make you sick and call them compromise and call them life and say they’re to be expected hitch hikers along for the ride but you don’t want to be twenty something and know that your hope has died