I love watching ballet, it has always been a great inspiration for me.
I think ballerinas can teach us a lot about performance.
The better the dancer the more effortless it seems to move.
Does it mean it is easy for them?
For sure not, as we all know this is an extremely competitive field which requires a lot of sacrifice.
Why do their work look so effortless on the stage?
Because if they work really hard, they can perform lightly. Great ballerinas do not need to count steps during their performance, it is all automatic. And they have space in their mind for adding some emotions on the top of technical excellence.
The same with piano players.
The best piano performances look effortless. It seems like it cost the musician nothing to play.
We could add here more examples from art, sport and many other fields which require to do a difficult task in a specific moment - to perform.
All these great performances we admire are preceded by many hours in the backstage - which actually is 99% of the time these people play.
Backstage is dark, full of sweat and tears, and frustration over endless unsuccessful trials. But this is the only way to get true confidence and lightness in any work.
Do you have dreams? You need to love the work in the backstage, because dreams are often short snippets and to get them 99% of your time will be sweat and tears in the backstage.
This is why it is so important to accept that the pain and struggle are part of life, and we cannot do anything valuable without them.
It is good to cultivate dreams, but instead of looking impatiently on snapshots we did not get yet, it is better to learn to enjoy all the effort we go through to get them. As this is going to be the biggest part of our time.
So why it is worth struggling 99% of your time for short snapshots of happiness and fulfilment?
Because this is the surest way to make life meaningful and to avoid depression, stagnation, and lack of purpose.
Unfortunately, our nervous system is designed for struggle - for fighting for survival, not for cosy, lazy vegetation in optimal conditions.
This is a challenge of contemporary world, where - at least on the west - everything is available with minimal effort. If you are satisfied with mediocrity, you can get everything instantly, cheap food, cheap entertainment, and cheap cosy coach to lay on. Engineers are working on virtual reality, so that we can just take on glasses to live in a magic world. Scientists are working on ‚magic pills' to reverse obesity, to get fit without a gym. So that we can be heroes at almost no cost. No struggle, no effort.
Unfortunately, these technologies are only illusions. Unless we will also figure out how to completely rewire our nervous system. Because human brain is rewarded by struggle. Instant gratification without a struggle is like a cocaine - it will destroy you in a long run.
We would need to re-design our brains in order to fit the new technologies of instant gratification. But all our identity is in our brains, so who will we be if we reshape its chemistry?
Science is often following the common sense. A lot of things known for centuries are getting re-confirmed by systematic scientific research.
Human struggle and happiness are one of the most important topics for all of us and a lot of effort has been put to explain it. So no surprise that what some people previously figured out based on experience and reasoning is now being reconfirmed with hard data from the labs. No true happiness and fulfilment are possible without a struggle.
If you get it too easily, you will be like a laboratory rat on drugs. Constantly stimulated and quickly destroyed.
Receipt for happiness and fulfilment?
I think Charles Bukowski captured this nicely:
'Find what you love and let it kill you.'
Find something you love to do and enjoy the constant struggle and short rewards which sometimes come, sometimes not - but failure is also a part of life. You will feel pain sometimes, but at least you will be alive and will not question the meaning of your existence.
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