Finding your yellow brick road.
Take any path to greatness. We glorify such a path as being unhindered. So long as you stick to it long enough, you will reach your Wizard of Oz where all of your worries and desires will be appeased. The same goes for your habits. As long as you consistently stick to your habits, making sure to specify the time and place that you wish to complete them, all will be well. You will become 1% better each day, and this will compound immensely, turning you into a superhuman whose impact on the world sees no bounds. Except… it (usually) won’t.
In these realms, success becomes the outcome and not the journey. We judge movie stars by their net worth, and not by the struggles they overcame to get to where they are. We choose for others what it means to be successful, belittling the lifestyle a monk undertakes when they claim in a video on Youtube that they’ve never been happier. No, because success is something else to us. It is financial security, or fostering a family that prizes first and foremost each other, or how many lives we saved or impacted at the end of our own, or how meaningful our friendships were.
Success becomes a thing to reach, to be reserved for tomorrow, and not to be seized now. It becomes finishing a book, not learning. It becomes acclimating to a new environment, and not playing our own game — actualizing what we want out of life, instead of blindly following the herd. Success becomes something to be, and not to become. You either have it or you don’t. And if you do have it, it won’t be for long because if you have no further ambitions in life, you will very soon find yourself unhappy. In other words, success won’t stop at having a million bucks… it will grow to five million, and then ten.
Back to the yellow brick road. After all, that is why you’re here. The title of this article suggests that I will tell you how to find your yellow brick road. Well, the surprising fact of the matter is that the road to success is invisible. And the reason it is invisible is because it doesn’t exist. It is none other than a psychological projection.
Joshua Waitzkin puts it brilliantly when he suggests that too many of us wait for the yellow brick road to appear under our feet, for the person that will wake up tomorrow on January 1st and be totally different, ready to embrace everything that comes their way. We tell ourselves that our moment to shine will come, and our real lives will begin. Our true love will come any moment now, we just have to be alert so as to not let the opportunity of meeting them slip by. We justify our undesirable qualities that we told ourselves we will change (the person that wakes up tomorrow won’t be the same person today). The bad posture, the poor workout habits, the unmade bed beside your wardrobe, the hours of scrolling on social media or tiktok, the inauthenticity we divulge to our “friends,” all of that will disappear… we tell ourselves. We spend countless days, weeks, years, even lifetimes, waiting in boredom, planning for the moment that the yellow brick road will show itself. And the moment never comes.
Transforming our lives, embarking upon exciting adventures, becoming a better person, these things don’t happen out of their own volition. It isn’t such that having a little bit of extra faith in G-d or Fortune will yield the transformation we’re after. While serendipitous vehicles do exist in society, these vehicles only exist for those who act on them, who board these trains of accelerated growth.
True, non-deceptive transformation, begins with transforming our mindsets, the very mechanisms which justify nearly every choice we make. It begins with falling in love with waiting, and engaging ourselves more fully in the things that we do. As Josh frames it, success and happiness appears to ultimately come down to developing “an appreciation for simplicity, the everyday—the ability to dive deeply into the banal and discover life’s hidden richness…”
In other words, pursue novel endeavors. Do things that pique your curiosity and urge you to learn more. With every ounce of dedication and passion you can muster, follow the things that are interesting to you. Travel the world and find beauty in the things you have not seen. Regain awe in the beauties you have seen, but haven’t truly seen. Love more deeply. Stop waiting for things. Perhaps most importantly, find a path to walk on. And if you don’t see one that gets you to where you’re headed, make one. Figure out what game you want to be a part of early in life, and play it (if you aren’t sure what this means, see Michael Raspuzzi’s blog post titled, “advice to ambitious young people”).
There will be pushback. The pushback is what makes it feel satisfying when you get past it. In The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin references an old Indian parable that hones in on the point of facing adversity along your path.
It is as follows:
“A man wants to walk across the land, but the earth is covered with thorns. He has two options - one is to pave his road, to tame all of nature into compliance. The other is to make sandals.” - Joshua Waitzkin.
The parable suggests that there are two main ways to combat adversity, the choice being ours to figure how to deal with it. One relies on the relationship between external environment and internal desires being frictionless — nature carves a path out for you to ensure that you succeed (not realistic). The other takes matter into your own hands, and equips you with the tools needed to face any obstacles that come your way. This includes physical and psychological obstacles.
In other words, do we get discouraged and fall down from the challenge, or do we adapt to the circumstances we’re confronted with and tread onward with the same internal resoluteness? Some paths will simply be easier to tread than others. Nevertheless, the most important thing we can do is to find the path we want to be walking on. It doesn’t have to be the “right” path—the concept of right or wrong is entirely arbitrary except for being a relative metric of how we’re moving relative to our goals. Besides, it is often the case that most people end up switching paths later on in life. That’s why it’s better to pursue anything and everything that interests us (with some consideration of opportunity cost) and follow it through to exhaustion, so long as we contain that same unwavering determination and excitement.
Now I will leave you, the reader, with two choices.
The first choice is, that you can skip past this article and move onto the next. Perhaps you’re thinking that this article was well-written, but not nearly momentous enough to move your actions in even the slightest. Or maybe the article was so poorly constructed and unoriginal that you can’t comprehend why you made it this far.
The second choice is for those that want this article to influence their life, even if only in the slightest. If this is you, and you’re having trouble coming up with things to takeaway with you before your eyes eclipse the final words of this page. Start by writing down all the things that you feel you’ve been neglecting lately. These may be unsought passions, disregarded friendships, family members, interests that seem way too unreasonable to spend a lot of time on in this moment. Which ones stand out to you? Which ones are you going to do something about right now? Will you message or call the person that you haven’t spoken to in years out of insecurity, or will you wait for them to do the same? The choice is yours.
To end with a quote from Napoleon Hill, “Don’t Wait. The time will never be just right.”