Shortcuts: why they don't pay

       There are a lot of recent news stories about people taking short cuts in all arenas of life. People are regularly defrauded in "get rich quick schemes" such as was the case with the head coach of the University of Hawaii football team. He lost $500K by relying on "too good to be true" promises about the growth on his investment. In reality, he failed to do his homework on the investment.
      My former roommate had a shortcut mentality when he refused to work hourly wage jobs and instead hopped from business to business promising him wealth untold. In all cases, he just ended up poorer than when he started if that was even possible. You would think that this old axiom would apply to those who take shortcuts:

        Unfortunately, this axiom is actually false in some cases at least as far as outward appearances go. Cheaters do sometimes prosper by worldly standards particularly in athletics. There are many athletes in many different sports who have found ways to enhance their performance through illegal means without getting caught and leveraged their success into vast wealth and popularity. Lance Armstrong is a prime example of this. Ditto to Alex Rodriguez, Ryan Braun, and many others in major league baseball. There are other athletes who cheat at the event rather than the preparation for the event such as the many runners who got caught taking the subway at the Berlin marathon.
       What complicates these stories is that Lance Armstrong, Ryan Braun, and others have gotten extremely rich and famous from their cheating ways. During the time that they were cheating, they were even viewed as role models. We will never know what these athletes might have done totally clean from performance enhancers. It's highly likely that they wouldn't have reached the pinnacle of their success in a natural way.

       Even if we overlook the fact that these athletes names are now tarnished forever, they still have the money they received for their unbelieveable performances while cheating. The only way either athlete (Braun or Armstrong) can make restitution is if they give back 100% of their gain from their career earnings. Since we know that won't happen, they will have to live with their own conscience and their tarnished reputations. Unfortunately, many cheaters won't receive true justice in this lifetime. They will retain unearned benefits as a direct result of cheating. Life isn't always fair to those who follow principles of honesty, integrity, and hard work to maximize their potential. Nonetheless, a clear conscience is a priceless reward.
       Even if there are a few people that take shortcuts that lead to unearned benefits unbeknownst to the world, it shouldn't be within our value system to cheat. Receiving unearned benefits only inhibits growth of our moral character and leads us down a path of having an "entitlement" mentality. This is a dangerous path that leads to wasting your potential, complacency, and disappointment when undeserved benefits aren't received. 
       Here's a Panda Express fortune that is better advice than a fortune:

        As an adult in today's complex world, there are many opportunities to take short cuts everywhere. This can be as a student taking shortcuts in your academic work, as an employee falsifying your time at work, as an investor not doing your homework on an investment opportunity, as an athlete using performance enhancers, and in many other arenas. You may get away with taking a shortcut sometimes, but it should be against our value systems.
       If you haven't determined it by now, I am very much against short cuts for everything that matters. The allure of getting "something for nothing" does not come from a divine source. The aggregate effect of takers would be a society that collapses. Here's a quote that appears to be the antithesis of this philosophy:

By work we sustain and enrich life. It enables us to survive the disappointments and tragedies of the mortal experience. Hard-earned achievement brings a sense of self-worth. Work builds and refines character, creates beauty, and is the instrument of our service to one another and to God. A consecrated life is filled with work, sometimes repetitive, sometimes menial, sometimes unappreciated but always work that improves, orders, sustains, lifts, ministers, aspires.

        The lesson is clear that usually short cuts lead to dead ends, compromising of divine principles, and even being in a worse position than you started. You sometimes have to turn around and go back to the start or get banned for cheating. Day to day work and making progress incrementally is the way to the finish line with a clear conscience.

Final Story

        When I was in the 8th grade, my older sister persuaded me to go out for the cross country running team. I didn't fully comprehend what "cross country" was, but I was drawn to the social aspect of it. The first day of practice, the coach explained that we'd be running an unsupervised 3 mile loop around the neighborhoods by the school. The coach would then stand there with his timer to see how fast we would complete the loop.
        Ready...set....go! We were off to run the course. The only problem was that after running a little ways, I got tired. Since I was out of sight of the coach, I would then walk a stretch, jog a stretch, walk again and eventually finish the course in embarassing times.
        Then one day...I had a brilliant idea. What if I: 1) ran until I was out of sight of the coach, 2) take a shortcut to the end of the loop, 3) wait for the faster kids to finish to make it believeable, and 4) then run into the finish in a much faster time than walk/jogging the whole loop. This strategy worked beautifully until...race day. The day of accountability finally arrived where I'd have to run the full course and be timed for everyone to see my progress as a runner.
       You can guess what happened next. My times in the races were slow and they didn't correspond to how fast my coach thought I was running in practice. My coach never called me out, but the race results were disappointing to me. I learned the lesson that taking short cuts in preparation of important events lead to mediocre results when the day of accountability arrives. Sometimes the best lessons are learned in Junior High.        

Tackling the Mundane Things of Life

             A few weeks ago, I watched a youtube video created from a 2005 commencement speech considered to be one of the best commencement speeches of all-time. The speaker mentioned this: “There happens to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches…One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration.” Although the speaker had a much deeper message than this post will cover, it's worth reading on;) and then listening to the full speech.

            I agree with David Foster Wallace that there are very few moments of elation in adult life. It seems as though most of the good stuff in life happens through the aggregation of smaller decisions and effort. That's not to say that there aren't a lot of happy moments. There are a lot of them. It's just that no matter what path we choose, there are also tradeoffs and things that we'd rather not do.

           In the business world, a business owner may combat the tradeoffs by hiring someone to do the less appealing duties of the job. On the other hand, in our personal lives the people who I respect the most bear the lion's share of the burden of the mundane things as a selfless way of taking away those duties from others that they love and care about. The husband and father who gets up in the early morning to shovel the driveway is a prime example of this, so his family doesn't need to.

 

          I should mention that typically mundane things can become a source of enjoyment in the long run. You may find the time spent outdoors and getting some exercise a nice part of your day. Many activities can be transformed into positive activities by training your mind to see the value in it. It may be just a matter of adapting and finding an efficient method to make the activity go by quickly.

          Since I’ve related running analogies so consistently on my blog, I will not hesitate to do so again. Marathons aren’t won just by deciding one day to go out and run. It’s the everyday decision to prepare and sacrifice their time and energy that allows a person to finish and be competitive. Here’s my blog’s first ever poem from an author unknown:

Stick to your task ’til it sticks to you;

Beginners are many, but enders are few.
Honor, power, place and praise
Will always come to the one who stays. Stick to your task ’til it sticks to you;
Bend at it, sweat at it, smile at it, too;
For out of the bend and the sweat and the smile
Will come life’s victories after a while.

           We all need to do both the mundane and the fun parts of work to accomplish anything worthwhile! You won't get very far just doing what you like to do and avoiding the rest consistently. One of my law school professors made the following observation roughly stated about the dream of many of becoming a litigator:

The dramatic courtroom victories that you see in movies and tv are far and few between. What you don’t see are the hundreds of hours of preparation and paperwork that must be done prior to proving your case. The life of a litigator is more dull than elation.

          The alternative approach for a litigator is to come into the court room unprepared and have a moment of drama similar to the following:

           The point that I'm getting to is that there can be value in the mundane things and sacrificing for others in between the moments of elation. When you prepare and make sacrifices with your discretionary time, your joy will be that much sweeter when you accomplish big things and in making the life easier of those around you. You may even find that your moments of elation come more frequently.