Self-Sacrifice: Embrace the Suck and Push Past Barriers

I’d like to force some of my opinions about self and self-sacrifice on you for a minute and how that sacrifice coincides with your accomplishments and how to be successful. There are a thousand different notions the world over on what ‘self’ is. I’m not concerned with the cosmic sense of self so much as I am with who you are as yourself. There is a lot that I would like you to know about yourself that I’ve spent a great deal of time learning about myself. However, if I had to impart one piece of knowledge to you, I would want you to know that personal growth and development isn’t easy, comfortable, or painless. It requires a great deal of self-sacrifice. From both reading and personal experience, I have come to learn that when people talk about their self-sacrifice and the blood, sweat, and tears that they have put into accomplishing their largest goals and ambitions, they’re being deadly serious. Putting forth your best effort day in and day out to make your wildest dreams become a reality is damn hard.

Self-Sacrifice and Embracing the Suck

A daily best effort requires embracing a mental suck, a physical suck, and a ‘whatever else’ suck. You know full well that you will be living in that suck until you get to spend every day basking in the light of all of your accomplishments. This is the hard thing about hard things. They take a lot of time, energy, and effort, and it’s not always easy to see the light at the end of the tunnel. No one who lives an interesting life has had an easy life. The completely crazy aspect about this whole process is that as soon as you’ve seen your first something through, you’ll want to do it all over again, and again, and again. You will very quickly come to realize that there are rare few feelings that match those of dragging yourself outside of your comfort zone, putting your big boy/girl/whatever boots on, and kicking ass (and maybe getting your ass kicked at times) until you’ve accomplished what you set out to do. Nothing tastes better than the way success feels. This newfound appreciation of the grind is one of the key tenets on how to be successful. Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to teach the incorporation self-sacrifice into one’s life. Self-sacrifice is more of a feeling and a mindset rather than a step-by-step path.

Self-Sacrifice and You

That being said, like so many other aspects of personal development, we would defer to our original goal of Implement: to perpetuate an environment that fosters personal cultivation and development through community, a plethora of daily support, and challenges. We want the work involved in the accomplishment of your goals to suck a little less. That isn’t to say you shouldn’t go out of your way to challenge yourself, but we want to help you avoid some, if not all of the mistakes we made along our journey. We want to help you celebrate all of your wins, big or small. Most importantly, we want you to have fun. Personal growth and development can be a huge pain at times. Forming new habits and accomplishing goals can and will result in more than a few nights of lost sleep. However, we want to let you know that those few nights of lost sleep spent on becoming your best self will be far less painful than nights spent lying awake wondering ‘what if’ and reflecting on opportunities too late to collect on. Pro-tip: it’s never too late to start on self-improvement. So here’s to you and yourself. Here’s to your past, current, and future self-sacrifice. Here’s to the blood, sweat, and tears spilt on the quest to challenge yourself and grow as an individual. Most importantly, here’s to loving every damn minute of it. Keep up the hard work, Implement community, we’re pulling for you!