"Growing up" whenever I see it used seems to me a euphemism for abandoning your passions and accepting the harsh reality of life. The context I see it used by a lot of people my age, is where they have finally realized that going after difficult jobs is pointless, and that what the real point of life is, is to get a decent paying job, start a family and settle somewhere.
Growing up means accepting that hard work is an absolute entry requirement for success. It doesn’t guarantee success. It’s just a requirement — even for getting a decent job, starting a family and settling. Personally, these are not things I’d criticize.
Val's post is useless. It asks me to accept "hard truths" without explaining how, and what kinds of truths we should accept. … It insinuates that I'm not working hard enough, somehow ignoring the fact that I've been working harder than most people I know.
A person can have a passion for theoretical physics, but s/he’ll never become a theoretical physicist without spending a lot of time learning very difficult mathematics. The passion for physics doesn’t replace the fact that a lot of the work of that learning is drudgery. It’s the same in pretty much any field, from running a restaurant to raising a child to running a business or making a movie.
If you want the thrill of making a scientific discovery or a critically acclaimed film, you need to put in an enormous amount of effort. And a lot of that effort is dull drudgery. This is even more so if you start a business on your own: you make the decisions, but until you raise cash, you also do the cleaning and the filing and everything else.
This is a hard truth. Accepting that success requires hard work, and then acting to achieve excellence, is the kind of thing that separates those who actually succeed from those who only think about succeeding. Stop thinking about your wings and
fly.*
They only spend 2-4 hours a day. But I've tried putting in more hours than that, but I fail every time because my mind does not cooperate with 8 hours of solid effort a day.
Unless you have a condition that limits your ability to work (and I’m not asking you to reveal that if you do), if you’re putting in 2-4 hours a day, you’re not trying. You’re pretending to try.
Your future is yours to shape. It’s your responsibility to make things happen. While your childhood shapes who you become, it doesn’t have to define it. So you didn’t get to learn piano as a kid. Okay. If you want to learn to play, it’s up to you to make that happen,
now.
*Paraphrased from
Middlemarch.
