Stop chasing instant pudding

We all want success and happiness now. We don’t want to experience pain or discomfort now. Why would anyone want to suffer in the moment if we have a choice?

This sentiment leads most of us to crave pleasure now. We don’t want unhappiness. We don’t want struggle. No, we simply want to keep enjoying life all the way through, now especially.

Reon Schutte was a former military special forces operator. He was captured and thrown into an African prison. The conditions were so poor that most of the inmates would die. He was beaten. He was starved. He was forced to sleep naked with more people in a cell than what seemed possible.

He wrote a book about his experience called Set Yourself Free, Reon Schutte’s 10 Principles to Break Out of Your Personal Prison through The Power Of Choice. Reading about his life, it is hard to feel that anything we do compares. In my life, I have never experienced the pain he experienced on a daily basis. I never experienced the hopelessness. I have never been sold out by those I care about like Reon had.

I have read his book several times because it puts everything in perspective. It is easy for any of us to start to get down about our current circumstances. We feel that life isn’t fair. We feel dismay. We feel we are owed more than what we are receiving.

Reon says, “The problem is not failure; it’s that we psyche ourselves out. That’s because we live in what I call an ‘instant pudding’ world: we want everything quick, fast and easy. If something doesn’t come instantly or easily, we say it’s not working, it’s failed, we’ve failed. But actually, what happens next is what causes us to fail: we say, ‘I give up.’ We have to believe in what we are doing in order to succeed, because that’s what keeps us going when it’s not ‘instant pudding’ success.”

People expect motivation to help push them towards success. But the problem with motivation is that it isn’t patient. It builds up the feeling that we have to start running towards our goals, NOW.

That is great to get started but horrible to sustain the effort required to hit most objectives. If our goals can be accomplished in a day, they aren’t great goals. Instead we have to learn how to set long-term direction in our life.

Then we have to learn how to sustain the energy required to reach our target. It won’t happen overnight. But that doesn’t mean failure. It means we have to adjust and keep working. We have to learn how to work AND make changes.

Early in my life I didn’t understand this. When something wasn’t going right I would quit and do something different. I would start over with some new endeavor.

By always starting out, I never built enough traction to get very far. So, I would get frustrated with the lack of progress. Then I would quit and start something else.

I finally learned that the key isn’t how you start. It is how you sustain. How do you keep going through the trials and tribulations? How do you endure the pain and discomfort that is necessary?

If we have an instant pudding mentality, we will be too quick to quit. We won’t hang in there and adjust as we work. Instead we quit working and begin again with something more likely to succeed right away.

But true happiness and success doesn’t come from avoiding pain and discomfort now. It is felt working through the challenges. It is from enjoying the journey, even if that journey is filled with stress and struggle. Because we can’t reach our highest ambitions with an instant pudding mindset.