Difference between amateurs and pros: Showing Up

 As we embark on our newly defined goals, targets, plans and personal resolutions, it’s a timely reminder to take responsibility and behave like a pro: show up, and show up consistently. 

Look, we’re all human right. 

There are days in which I really don’t feel like exercise. I mean, it’s not like I have major health issues or anything.. Take it easy, mate. 

There are days I really don’t feel like playing with my son, with those same mundane toys, and reading that same “favorite book” that we have read together 29 times. 

There are exhausting days in which I just don’t feel like waking up at 5:00am for Fajr, let alone go to the mosque. I might as well just pray at home, two quick rakaah, up down touch the ground, done. After all, I fulfilled my obligation, right?

In fact, NGL there are weeks which I really don’t feel like doing another episode of The Barakah Effect podcast. Not only is it very tiring & time consuming to research, coordinate, talk, edit, upload, but we have to fork out money to get it produced. I feel like informing the team to take the week off with a justifiable excuse of “spending quality time with the family”. Who would know?

.. Yet we get up, we show up, and we do it anyway. 

"Self-discipline is the ability to make yourself do what you should do when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not.” (Brian Tracy)

We tend to only do something when we “feel” like doing it, or when we receive inspiration from the heavens. But as long as we operate with this fragile mindset of relying on our fickle feelings & succumbing to them, we will never accomplish anything terribly significant, by our own merit: Instead, we will be in constant firefighting mode, only waiting for external circumstances to force ourselves to get things done.

 

The tabi’ee Thabit al-Bunani said, “I struggled against myself for twenty years to perform the prayers. Then, for the next twenty years, I enjoyed it” (Ref: Sifat as-Safwah)

Think about that: struggled for 20 years! Many of us try a few times, and we give up, convinced that we are hopeless. He had the grit to show up, stick to it, and eventually he loved it. What drives him to fight this discomfort? 

We cannot rely on inspiration or motivation. What we need is PURPOSE. We need a higher goal that transcends our own personal conveniences: one that always reminds us us keep our eyes on the prize. A drive to have a sense of urgency to keep moving, and not give in to that temptation of complacency and comfort, that tells us that “good enough” is good enough. An ambition that shapes our identity to be more than our present selves.

To show up. To do the right thing, even when you don’t feel like it. 

And that, my friends, is the quality that distinguishes the amateurs: between the dreamers and the doers.