"If you could get there by yourself, you should already be there." - Dan Lok

Intro

A few months before I discovered Steemit, I was scared I'd probably die a consumer of content and never muster enough courage to create content myself. I always thought "what do I have to offer people and why will they want to listen to me?"

The truth is that I kept consuming so much that it really had to become useful someday in life. I had read most of the books I could lay my hands on and watched as many videos as electricity and internet subscriptions let me. These things weren't going to waste but were being stored up until the point when I wasn't even thinking about them and then they began to show up. Due to this background, seeing quotes like the one above isn't necessarily a strange thing to me but considering the fact that lately, I've relented quite a bit in both my consumption and creation of content, the above quote got my brain cells jogging again today.

I don't know if I thought the entire world was going to think like me and get the same message I got from the quote but it took a conversation with a friend to realize that there is truly more than one way to skin a cat. That conversation spurred me to flesh out my thoughts and see what you guys think of the quote.

My Take

I have somewhat come to believe in the potency of partnerships and cooperation with other quotes like "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together" readily coming to mind. The first thing that struck me from the initial quote is the need to involve more than yourself in your journey. Further thinking, however, exposes the fact that you don't necessarily need to involve others.

So if you take a critical look at the quote, it says considering all the effort you've been putting in, if your destination is somewhere your effort could take you, you should have been there already. Now the first thought to counter this would be "how do you know when to give up and ask for help?" or "what's now the place of persistence?"

I don't really have the answers as these were questions that came to my mind but I found a somewhat simple analogy that seemed to calm my raging mind. The first step is to define your "there".

"If you could get there by yourself, you should already be there." - Dan Lok

Where is the "there" you're trying to get to? Going back to my analogy, let's assume my "there" is to be a millionaire. If I am able to become a millionaire on my own with nobody's help, it simply means I could get "there" by myself and everything is all good and fine.

If my "there" is to be a billionaire and I achieve it without anyone's help, it simply means I have the capacity to do so by myself and it's all good and fine. So as long as you set out to achieve a thing and then you are successful at it, we are all good.

However, the moment you are starting to find it difficult to achieve your "there" after putting in so much effort, you could then start to consider other options. It is this point I believe the quote is trying to address. There is the high possibility that a major reason why you are not "there" yet is because you can't/shouldn't do it on your own. I don't think you really can achieve more than you have the capacity for. This is not to say that you shouldn't dream big but you should look to build the capacity big enough to actualize your dreams. Whether this capacity building will take place within your system alone or involve other people is then left to you.

Conclusion

I like to think that considering time, and other valuable resources, it always makes way more economical sense to go the route of bringing experience on board rather than trying to be the "jack of all trades".

What do you think?

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