Outwork the competition. Outlast them. Out-grind everyone in the room.
…was trying harder.
You’ve heard it. I didn’t just hear it — I built my early years on it.
When I was younger, I was certain that breakthroughs were a function of force. Work harder. Pray more. Push, and push, and push again. Out-hustle every competitor and the results would come. So I did exactly that — not for weeks or months, but for years. I was faithful to the grind. I gave it everything I had.
And here’s the uncomfortable part: it sort of worked. I saw some results. Just never the breakthrough I was promising myself. It felt like a treadmill — exhausted, clocking real mileage, going nowhere. So I did what the grind philosophy tells you to do when the grind isn’t working: I assumed I just hadn’t ground hard enough. I shoved the doubts down and pushed harder.
Until one ordinary day I sat in my room, with no dramatic setback to point to — no crash, no disaster — just the flat realisation that after all those years of pushing, fighting business fires, and managing everyone’s expectations and emotions, the big wins I’d been certain were coming simply weren’t.
I was mentally and physically done. And out of that emptiness I finally asked a real question: “Lord, what am I doing wrong?”
The answer wasn’t what I expected.
The battle I was fighting was the wrong one
What I heard back, in essence, was this: the real battle was never out there.
I had been treating my struggle as entirely external — markets, chance, opportunities, competitors to outwork. But the thing actually holding me back was internal. I had been running everything on my own strength and my own understanding — which works, to a point, and then quietly caps you.
The sharpest way I can put the error: I had been praying “God, bless what I’m doing,” when I should have been asking “God, lead me to where You want me to go.”
Sit with the difference between those two prayers. One asks heaven to ratify a plan I’d already locked in. The other asks for the plan itself. For years I’d been demanding a co-signer when what I needed was a compass.
That realisation hit me as both repentance and relief — repentance for how long I’d white-knuckled it, and relief because, for the first time, there was a door out of the treadmill.
What I actually changed (and you can too)
This isn’t a “let go and let God” platitude. It changed how I operate. Three concrete shifts:
1. I stopped forcing my plans and started seeking direction first. Instead of locking a strategy and asking for a blessing on it, I started asking what to focus on before committing — and then following the nudge, even when it was just a small piece of the picture. (I’m a big-picture person; small, partial direction used to make me anxious. I’ve made peace with moving on less.)
2. I let go of the rigid timeline. I used to set hard targets — “we’ll hit X revenue in Y months via Z moves” — and then grind against reality when it refused to cooperate. Now I plan conservatively, enough to keep the business genuinely sustainable, and I stop treating my self-imposed deadline as gospel. The pressure that used to come from fighting my own arbitrary clock mostly evaporated.
3. I take small, obedient steps even without the full map. I no longer require certainty of the whole path before I move on the next right thing. The next clear step is enough.
The shift took time to roll out. My team was wary at first — they asked what had happened. But once they understood I was loosening the death-grip and steering by discernment rather than force, I think they got happier too. The business changed. It doesn’t always go the way I’d have scripted it — but I can take that in stride now, because the goal stopped being “my plan, executed” and became “the right direction, followed.”
The question to actually use
If you feel stuck — genuinely stuck, despite real effort — here’s the diagnostic I’d hand you before any tactic:
Are you fighting a battle that was never yours to fight? Are you forcing an outcome instead of discerning a direction?
Because here’s the operator truth underneath the spiritual one: more force is not a strategy. Past a certain point, grinding harder on the wrong plan just gets you to the wrong place faster, more tired. The leverage isn’t in the pushing. It’s in pointing the push somewhere worth going.
Three things to try this week:
- Before your next big decision, pause and ask — is this the right direction, or just the plan I’m already attached to?
- Write down one area where you’re striving purely on your own strength, and deliberately loosen your grip on it.
- Take one small step you’ve been refusing to take until you could see the whole path.
Stop out-grinding the wrong battle.
Breakthrough was never on the other side of more force.