Addicted to the grind:
The unstoppable power of evidence-backed belief.
It was actually a quote I saw (below) that made me want to write about this. It’s incredibly powerful knowledge once understood.
The grind, if you’re not familiar with it, is a slang term used to describe the process of working hard every day towards your most ambitious goals.
“Once you start seeing your potential, the grind becomes addictive.”
In my experience, this is absolutely true, although it’s taken a lot longer than I’d have liked to realise it, if I’m honest, but better late than never. But I have no doubt that it’s true: once you develop the belief in yourself that you can actually achieve your greatest goals, and that your wildest ambitions might not just be the pipe dreams that we’re led to believe they are, the belief begins to flow. You begin to believe that success on a level most people only dream about isn’t as unattainable as we often assume, and getting out of bed every day and making the most of every minute you’re awake becomes significantly easier, because life itself becomes much more exciting.
This tends to happen when you start attempting feats that initially make you nervous, and you feel are a little beyond your ability, and it’s this step that unfortunately proves too much for many people and stops them from even trying. If you can push forward, however, despite those reservations, and persevere through the setbacks and failures you will inevitably face on the journey, you will break through eventually, and once you do, you will find it difficult to stop. You will also start to acquire skills that you previously thought were far beyond your ability, which is exciting enough in itself. At the same time, what began as a matter of simple belief in yourself will quickly gather around it a mass of hard evidence. Allow me to elaborate further…
Once you start working hard, and I mean really hard, consistently, in a direction that genuinely excites you, you will eventually start to see results. You’ll become good at things that you actually want to be good at, and those results will only serve to reinforce your belief in yourself and what you might be capable of. That’s the hard evidence I’m talking about. Belief leads to hard work, which brings achievement, something clear and indisputable, and that bolsters belief still further. The more you go through this cycle of belief, hard work, and the results that stem from it, the easier it becomes to believe. Obviously, it helps to remain grounded and not let yourself get too carried away, but a little helping of supreme optimism never hurt anyone.
I don’t want to sound like I think I’m some beacon of success, and that I have everything figured out, because I’m not, and I haven’t, but if you’ll allow me, I can cite myself as an example. If you’d have told me 20 years ago, when I was 26 years old, that by the time I was 46 (a milestone I’ll reach in less than a month) that I’ll have had my own martial arts academy for over 10 years, and that I’d have written and published a book, I would have laughed in your face. I don’t say this to brag or to impress you, but simply to show you that if I can do it, and trust me, I’m nothing special, then anyone can. The reason I have been able to achieve this, I believe, despite being a man of average intelligence and average ability, is that I have found an exciting path in life, a set of goals I love waking up to and pursuing every single day. As a result, I’ve been able to eliminate anything that lessens my capacity to reach those goals, cutting out things like alcohol, and hours spent mindlessly scrolling on my phone.
As I write this, I haven’t had an alcoholic drink for over 4 months now. I was never a big drinker to start with, but one day it just hit me that when I did drink, it was having a significant negative effect on my capacity to chase those goals. The hangover from a moderate drinking session seemed to last for days, and the remnants of a particularly heavy night sometimes haunted me for weeks. This made me lazy, affected my memory, and zapped my motivation, so I decided, in the end, that if I was to have any chance of seeing what I was truly capable of, I had to function at full capacity at all times, which meant alcohol had to go. I’m not saying I’ll never drink again, but right now, I’m enjoying the feeling of waking up every morning fresh and ready for action. I am committed to a significantly lengthy break from drinking, and to see whether my life improves as much as I think it’s going to as a result. I shall report back.
I teach my junior students at my martial arts academy the mindset of getting up every single day and trying their best at whatever task it is that’s in front of them. I teach the benefits of discipline, perseverance, determination, commitment, and of working hard towards where you want to be in life, even on the days where you just can’t be bothered. Those days are arguably the most important, because until you find that belief, they will be the most numerous.
I learned this mentality far later than I would have liked to, and I’m determined that my young students won’t miss the opportunity to learn it much earlier. I’m so passionate about this because I believe it works. If you make a conscious choice to do your very best every day, to grow as a person, and to be productive in the direction of your goals, if you push through and don’t give up even when things get difficult, then you can’t fail to move in a positive direction, and your chances of long-term success are increased to the point where they’re all but guaranteed.
If you adopt this mentality, and it becomes habitual, you have no idea of where you’ll be, or who you’ll be, or of the unstoppable mindset you can develop, in the space of just a few years. Nothing builds a deep, lasting confidence more than achieving positive results from your own efforts and hard work. When you know you’re on a continuous ascent towards the place where you want to be in life, and you can feel yourself making progress every day, life becomes exciting, and addictive, and you start to identify and eliminate anything that holds you back. In my case, this was alcohol, but alcohol isn’t the only culprit: I’m working hard to change other bad habits I have acquired, such as my penchant for staying up late for no reason, and eating huge meals late at night after I’ve finished teaching my evening classes, both of which hinder me from getting a good night’s sleep, and thus hold me back from being at my best.
To wrap up, I will return to the original quote that kicked off this particular discussion.
“Once you start seeing your potential, the grind becomes addictive”
I hope this article has helped you understand what that means. Working hard towards your goals in life, improving yourself as a person, and the excitement you can’t help but feel from your daily, incremental progress, becomes your addiction. Positive addictions do exist, and this is one of them.
BUILDING WARRIORS:
ADDITIONAL: I am the author of the self-development book BUILDING WARRIORS: The Life Skill Training of a Dedicated Martial Arts Instructor (above), which was published in June 2021, and is available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle and various other eBook platforms. The book is based on the life-skill-based mindset training that I teach to my young students at my Martial Arts Academy. You can find out more about this book, including the Amazon reviews, by visiting rainvalleypublishing.com.
Thank you, Graham!! 🙏