The Result Is Not Up To Us

Dear reader, Last month I wrote about how important it is to know what is up to us, and what is not up to us. To separate the things and events that are in our control, and those that are not.

I wrote about the Three Decisions that shape our Destiny: What am I going to focus on? What does it mean? What am I going to do?

And that this is, in a very fundamental sense, not only the path to success, but also to happiness.

These ideas come from Stoic philosophy: and the Stoics were men of action. As Thoreau wrote in Walden, “To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school… It is to solve some of the problems of life, not theoretically, but practically.”

So the question is: how should we live our lives, when we know that the result of our actions is not always up to us?

“Games are won by players who focus on the field, not the ones looking at the scoreboard.”
– Warren Buffett

The answer is simple: in a world full of uncertainty, focus on improving your skills instead of worrying about the reward. But in a world where we are constantly comparing ourselves to others and our competitors, that can be extremely hard to remember.

For example, imagine you’re playing a friendly football game. There are 5 minutes left in the game, and your side doesn’t have a hope in hell of winning. What do you do? Do you give up? It’s a friendly game after all: why waste the energy? Or do you decide to play to the final whistle, knowing that what is important are the skills and experience you’ll gain?

In the long run what matters is not what the score is now – or even who wins the game – but who you become as a result of the experience you gain. Because that is something that no one will ever be able to take away from you.

Many people make the mistake of wanting to achieve in the false belief that they will one day reach that magical place where they will finally be fulfilled and happy. That if they can just climb to the pinnacle of that mountain in front of them, they will finally find what they are looking for; that they will fill that emptiness they feel.

The truth, unfortunately, is that if you do not know how to be happy right where you are, no amount of achievement or success or stuff will ever make you happy when you finally get “over there”.

We all spend so much time trying to get the happy life, that we forget to live in the happy moment – and of course the happy life is nothing more than a string of happy moments.

Instead, we must realise that growing as a human and overcoming the challenges of life is itself the point: one of the most fundamental contributors to our happiness is progress. As long as we feel that we are constantly growing and making progress towards our goals and dreams, we will feel happy. If we stagnate, no matter what the status quo is, we will feel unfulfilled.

Growth, not achievement, is what we should all be aiming at.

There is an old Haitian proverb: “Behind mountains are more mountains.” The point of overcoming that obstacle in front of you is not to magically enter the land of no obstacles. The point of climbing mountains is not to reach the summit. The point is to become the person you need to be in order to reach that summit.

So stop worrying about the Result. Concentrate, as Marcus Aurelius said, “on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness… And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can — if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? If you can manage this, that’s all even the gods can ask of you.”

Yours Sincerely,
Henry Chong