When we start a new journey, we’re often moving away from something. In my case, it was leaving behind the hustle culture. If you look at my earlier posts, I was all about challenging the hustle culture mindset, the grind mentality, and the ruh-ruh-ruh motivational gurus who preach success at all costs. Working in startups, where the goal is often to make it big fast (aka going IPO), only fueled my resistance to this culture. My goal became doing anything BUT THAT.
Recently, my loud rejection of hustle culture has quieted, and I’ve started focusing more on the life I’m building rather than the one I left behind. In a recent post, I shared my aspiration for a life of calm ambition.
I believe it’s possible to step off the exhausting merry-go-round of hustle and burnout and instead cultivate a life of calm ambition—a life where we aim to contribute meaningfully, create good things, and earn a living, but in a thoughtful, gentler way.
This shift has led me to reflect on what a life of calm ambition might look like, and I’d like to start unpacking it here on the blog as I build out these principles for myself.
Great Things Take Time
Now that I’m in my 30s, I’m just starting to see the first fruits of my friends’ long-term efforts—like the first cherry blossoms of spring, still far from a full harvest. These are the friends who didn’t waste time chasing shortcuts (more on that below). We’re talking about a decade or more of quietly moving in one direction. That’s a lot of time, but apparently, that’s how long it takes.
The media loves a story of young success, which feeds our sense of urgency. But in the real world, things are different. Let’s look at the data.
Research shows that the average age of a business founder in the U.S. is 41.9 years old, and older founders consistently have higher chances of success, up to age sixty.
Founders are also about twice as likely to build an extremely successful business if they previously worked in that industry
*Don’t Trust Your Gut* by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
You can’t make a baby in three months by working really hard. Similarly, you can’t gain enough experience, master soft skills, or weather economic cycles in just a year. Mastery takes time. It’s something I wish I could tell my younger self: slow down, and don’t be so impatient. This should and will take time.
The Tremendous Cost of Pursuing Shortcuts
The pursuit of shortcuts often steals more time than it saves. This was a painful realization for me. A big part of my twenties was spent chasing shortcuts. It all started with reading The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris. I was fresh out of university, working three part-time jobs while looking for a full-time job in the field I studied for. That summer, I remember feeling a mental shift after reading that book: if only I could find the next big thing, I’d hardly have to work!
And so, the search began.
Over the years, I explored every possible shortcut to the dream life—drop-shipping, Amazon FBA, affiliate marketing, Etsy stores, white labeling, print-on-demand—you name it. I spent countless evenings and weekends learning about these ventures, buying online courses, playing around with ideas, launching online stores, and ordering samples from China. It would lead nowhere because, eventually, I would hit the wall where hard and boring work was required. But I was told I wouldn’t have to do any of that… It should only take 4 hours a week, so something was off there. So I would start searching for the next big but easy thing.
The day I finally estimated how much time I’d spent chasing shortcuts was a sad but transformative one. Those years could have been spent quietly mastering a skill, investing all that discretionary effort into a job that would’ve led to a big promotion, or starting a traditional business and growing it sustainably.
This applies not only to career paths but also to productivity hacks and tools.
We spend so much time looking for the next productivity app and watching YouTube tutorials. However, you still need to do the hard and boring work, no matter what app you use to record this task. But the marketing departments made us belief that if only we could find that one app, our resistence will be gone. It doesn’t work like that.
The Non-Scandalous Secret to Success
If you look beyond clickbait success stories and focus on people and businesses you truly rely on daily, what’s their secret? More often than not, they simply outlast everyone else. They show up day in and day out, serve their customers, and keep adapting.
When trying to cultivate a life of calm ambition, I aim to optimize for longevity rather than quick wins. When I’m faced with a decision, I ask, “Does this action increase my chances of sticking with this for years to come, or does it decrease it?”
Let me tell you a story.
In our camping business, we sometimes have customers calling trying to arrange for our service last minute. Usually, most of our bookings are placed at least a week in advance. Last-minute clients create stress on our operations and often don’t care for our equipment as well, nor do they tend to leave reviews or recommend us. I can’t help but mutter the phrase, “How you do one thing is how you do everything!” like a cranky old lady when dealing with these people.
This summer, I asked myself if serving last-minute customers would help me enjoy this business for years to come. The answer was clear: it wouldn’t. I gave myself permission to tell these customers we’re fully booked. Sure, I lost on a few sales. But I gained in my overall enjoyment of running this business.
Practical Advice for Building a Life of Calm Ambition
We can conclude that most meaningful pursuits take time, and shortcuts often slow us down. But if we focus on simply staying in the game long enough, statistics are on our side.
Here are some takeaways for cultivating a life of calm ambition:
Pursue things you know you can do for years to come.
This is my favourite type of productivity advice – the one that takes your to-do list and throws a big chunk of it away. (Another advice from this category is to use backlog.)
This approach cuts out get-rich-quick schemes, trends, and hacks that don’t align with your values.
It doesn’t mean you have to do everything for years. But having this idea as a filter helps you reduce the mile-long to-do list to something more managable. It gives you permission to not do a lot of things you thought you should do.
How long will it take for your project to be considered successful? I don’t know. But if the Bible is a valid source of life advice for you, this is the timeline it gives:
“When you enter the land and plant any kind of fruit tree, don’t eat the fruit for three years; consider it inedible. By the fourth year its fruit is holy, an offering of praise to GOD. Beginning in the fifth year you can eat its fruit; you’ll have richer harvests this way.” (Leviticus 19:23-25).
It’s still a surprisingly good estimate of how much time is required to build something meaningful.
Expect things to take time, and stop searching for shortcuts.
Interestingly enough, the plan looks different when you decide ahead of time to not look for shortcuts. You just do the right thing at the right time and allow for time to do its work. No need to do all that research trying to find a secret shortcut. You just start doing the hard thing right away while everyone around you is trying to find the easy next step to do because “success is supposed to happen fast these days”. And all of a sudden you are already ahead. Take the high road. It’s less crowded.
You start treating time as an important ingredient in a recipe. 100 cups of effort, 50 rounds of repetition, 5 tablespoons of creativity, 10 grams of luck, and 4 months of time. Without the time ingredient, most recipes won’t work.
When given a choice, optimize for longevity.
The goal is to keep writing, keep the doors open, keep married, and keep practicing your craft.
Ask yourself, “Does this action increase my chances of sticking with this for years to come?”
This frame is incredibly helpful when you need to have a difficult but important conversation with someone. Think about the long-term benefit of keeping this relationship going rather than short-term pain of having this difficult conversation.
Are there any pursuits in your life right now where you’re focusing on longevity over short-term success? How does this mindset change your day-to-day approach? I would love to hear your stories. You can send me a message here.
You can find the core Agile and Scrum principles and their practical application to one’s life on the Start Here page.
If you want to read my most recent posts, click here.
