We are living in a hacking culture.
Hack your sleep. Hack your diet. Hack your morning routine. Hack your way to focus, to wealth, to love, to enlightenment. Everywhere you look, someone is selling a faster, easier, shorter path to something that has traditionally taken a lifetime to develop.
And most people are buying.
I understand the appeal. We are wired to want things quickly. I think a lot of this hacking culture today comes from how we have been trained by technology over the last few decades.
We are so used to getting what we want as quickly as we want it. If I live in a major city in the United States, I can have a package delivered from Amazon the same day or the next day. I do not even have to leave my house. If I want something downloaded, I can grab it off the internet in seconds. I can connect and talk with people anywhere in the world instantly. We use technology all day long, and our minds have been trained to be instantly gratified.
The problem is that this perspective does not stay confined to technology. It gets redirected toward our own personal development — physical, emotional, mental, spiritual. We start to ask, why do I need to do it the slow way? How can I accelerate this? What can I inject myself with? What frog can I lick? What can I smoke? What ceremony with a shaman can I be a part of to get from A to B as quickly as possible?
But we are living organisms. We grow and develop slowly. That is how it is.
We have planted over nine thousand trees and plants here in Costa Rica. Every single one of them I have had to watch grow slowly, and there is nothing I can do to accelerate that. When my mango trees flower, it takes a certain number of weeks for those flowers to turn into ripe, edible fruit. I cannot hack that process. I cannot accelerate it.
We are no different. But we want to be — and that is the mistake. We have taken the way we use technology and turned it on ourselves, expecting our inner life to respond the way our devices do. It does not. The expectation is placed not only on our inner life, but on our bodies, our minds, our emotions, and more. And when none of it responds the way we want, we feel stressed. We feel anxious. Discouraged. We abandon the practice and reach for the next thing, and the cycle begins again.
We see influencers in fleeting seconds online, showing an amazing life they lead because of X, Y, or Z. And we want that too. So we go down that path, not realizing that their journey and our journey are completely different. We are at different points in our evolution, in different environments, requiring different tools, guidelines, perspectives, and approaches.
The slowest path is often the fastest path when it comes to personal growth.
Get clear about what it is you want. Find the right tools and guidelines that support you where you are right now in your journey. And then consistently apply them. Yes, it can get boring. You are repeating the same things over and over again — every day, every week, every month, perhaps every year. But that is okay. That is how you make progress.
Most people cannot commit to this. The path of hacking their way forward is much more appealing. Why do the work when I can get there by doing X? Fall in love with the simplicity and power of repetition.
Be the one who is willing to do the work, and willing to take the time. The rewards, as my guru always said, are far greater than the efforts put into it. Choose the slower path. It will take you further than you think.
