Earning Results Through Perseverance

I was reading a book some time ago called Geisha, by Lesley Downer. As the name suggests, the book is about the Geisha of Japan, and in the beginning of the book the author talks about her experience traveling to Kyoto (the traditional Geisha area of Japan) to learn all she could about them.

As a foreigner trying to look into a very secretive world, she found it very difficult to get any information from people. Everywhere she went, people would tell her that they didn’t know any Geisha personally and didn’t really know much about them either.

She constantly expressed her interest in Geisha to everyone, tried to make as many contacts as she could, and asked many people about Geisha for her book, but she constantly got the same dead-end answers from everybody.

It seemed that the Geisha world was just too secretive, and she started to believe that she would never be able to find out anything about them.

After several months of persevering however, people slowly started to open up to her. She soon found that not only did many of the people she got to know in Kyoto in fact know about Geisha, a good number of them were actually Geisha themselves.

Despite her enthusiasm and interest in Geisha, no one was willing to confide in her when she first arrived in Kyoto. It wasn’t until she proved herself by being a regular fixture in Kyoto and having an unwavering resolve for her goal for several months that the Japanese locals gradually began to accept and trust her.

She basically had to earn their trust over time.

There is a Japanese idiomatic phrase that translated reads, “Three years on a rock”. It basically means that someone has to work at something for a long time before they can expect results. This is a concept that is very Japanese.

In the modern world, this isn’t something that’s always easy to accept. We are too busy, too impatient, and often also too lazy to want to work at something for a long time. We just want fast and easy results.

The problem is that life is very much like the Japanese people Lesley wrote about in her book. It tests us, and wants us to prove that we deserve the results we’re looking for before granting them to us. Until we do that, life will just disregard our so-called desires no matter how much noise we make.

This attitude of quick and easy results is very destructive when it comes to losing weight and getting into shape. So many people want the results, but they don’t want to spend the time and effort it takes to earn those results. This is why there are so many shonky but successful eight loss products that claim to work like magic in no time at all. The people who create these products know that there is a huge demand for “miracle” products so they make wild and misleading claims about what they can do, and people can’t help but flock to them.

People will often spend years jumping from one product to another to another in the search for quick results, but all they end up doing is spinning their wheels, getting no closer to their goals, and getting frustrated.

The fastest and easiest way to get results in weight loss, fitness, or any other area of life for that matter, is to commit yourself to doing what it takes to earn them, and to persevere until they happen. This is the only real way to meaningful results.

You can’t allow yourself to get distracted by promises of easy results, they are an illusion. Life doesn’t work that way, and fitness certainly doesn’t work that way. You only get what you earn and deserve in life, so be prepared to “sit on a rock” for as long as it takes!