Why You Should Play the Long Game

If there is one component of change that seems foreign to our culture more than any other, it would be the idea that transformation takes time.

Recently, I’ve been exploring the notion of change (there’s a bunch of podcast episodes under the title “A Guide to Changing Things” or a slew of articles that I’ll link to at the bottom) and when it comes to this idea of a process, I have a bit of an ax to grind.

Essentially, I don’t think our society is thinking rightly about the very nature of transformation. I, therefore, want to do my due diligence in offering an alternative.

Because I don’t think change is like flipping a light on or off.

It’s more like a dimmer switch.

Part One — Do We Have an Anti-Change Culture?

My working assumptions here are twofold:

First, I understand change and transformation to be a slow process — a continual experience that requires time and difficulty. I’ve made arguments for this elsewhere.

Second, I sense our cultural disposition is a clamor for immediate, impulsive solutions in response to change’s unavoidable difficulty.

Hence, I also assume these approaches — the slow process of change and our culture’s pursuit of easy, bypassing solutions — are mutually exclusive.

Whether it is clickbait articles, a burgeoning industry of self-help books, or the sequestering disease that are slyly referred to as MLM’s, we seem to put more effort into circumventing the process than the actual process itself. Yet, if such a process is integral to the nature of finite, limited beings, we may be doing so at our own expense.

What happens when we offer a plethora of products, programs, and experiences that are supposedly life-changing without much difficulty?

How many pyramid schemes (a great way to grow a cash base at other people’s expense, by the way) are based on making the consumer believe that some unknown technique, product, or ingredient has simply been hidden from purview? With a gnostic-like secret, such transformation was never-before obtainable, but, for enough money, you can get in on the trick. Who knew achieving your desired change was so easy!

We appear to be a culture of magic pills, silver bullets, and over-simplified, singular answers that are more akin to lifestyle conspiracy theories than health, wellness, or identity transformation. In fact, actual transformation appears to run absolutely counter to this shortcutting, life-hacking, secret ingredient, and over-simplified technique culture we have before us.

Can you imagine a QVC commercial for change?

“We’re here to tell YOU about a process that will change your life over the course of the next 10–20 years!”

How, then, do we embrace actual change and transformation in a culture that is bent on skipping the process and getting answers without the work and discipline of actually becoming?

Part Two — The Process

Much of my belief about change is based on the Transtheoretical Stages of Change and, for our current discussion, the third stage harkens to our troubling cultural situation.

The third stage is “Action” and the core idea is that external conditions need to be established to help alter the internal decision of where you want to go. I often refer to this as making a “shift” (an initial, interior change of trajectory) followed by a “transition” (where said journey tangibly unfolds over time). The implication is that the transition requires consistent action throughout the duration of life. This is why the fourth stage is called “Maintenance” — because once you begin the change, the bulk of the work is to maintain that process as life continues to ebb and flow.

The reason that maintenance is such an important stage is that one of the most common obstacles to making a change is the form of resistance that rears its fastidious face in the immense difficulty of change.

Change so often fails to blossom because change is hard and it happens slowly.

Like the transformation of a metamorphic rock — a process by which igneous or sedimentary rocks undergo a tremendous amount of heat, pressure, stress, and difficulty over time — change is a very particular existential experience that cannot be shortened.

Change, as it happens, is like a marathon. It is a long game by default.

If you are going to run a marathon and someone says, “I can give you a way to make this marathon super easy. After the first mile you can cut through this business plaza and be at the last leg of the run,” it would certainly make the marathon easier, but it would also mean that you never actually ran a marathon. Whatever benefits the marathon and training offered — as well as the accomplishment of enduring such a difficult process — would be absent.

The entire holistic adventure of the marathon is transforming more than just a credibility to say you did it. The physical, mental, emotional, relational, and ideological health associated with such a feat is only obtained if you endure the grueling slog of the process.

I would argue, therefore, that creating a market and a culture in which we constantly claim to have finally overcome this difficulty by making change no longer hard or no longer slow might mean that we are being offered something that doesn’t deal with change at all.

You can’t claim to have a metamorphic rock by just adding a bit of paint and saying it has transformed. You may make the rock look externally different, but the actual material configuration is the same. You can modify the rock, but you haven’t transformed its nature.

Part Three — A Culture That Avoids the Process is Stealing Something

What are we stealing? By proposing alternatives that actually avoid the process, we are stealing the journey of a transformed constitution; leaving folks with a sentiment of difference while ensuring that nothing will ever have to be different.

We’re talking about modification versus transformation.

In offering modification, we are stealing transformation.

Like an aged wine or a delicious fermented beverage or a wise person — there aren’t any shortcuts to these processes. Doing so will leave you with something inherently different than good wine, a fermented beverage, or wisdom.

And if you’ve ever had a beverage where someone skipped the necessary time for the molecular change of bacteria eating sugar — now you know the taste in my mouth when I see how our culture approaches change.

We are very willing to talk about the process. Many famous authors and podcasters have built entire brands that are much more popular than anything I’ve ever done by glamorizing “the process.” But we still seem to prefer magic pills and silver bullets, giving our limited attention to stylized fonts on a social media graphic or a person with a hip brand or a stellar following because they are famous.

As a brief aside, if someone has put more effort into the appeal of their brand than their actual content, you might be getting tricked by pyrite instead of gold.

The cultural effect, however, is that we feed the machine of marketable products because it satisfies a transformative urge instead of enduring a process that is anything but romantic. Why go to therapy when you can listen to a Ted-Talk? Why develop a new habitual routine and literally rewire your physiology through your myelin sheath (which will take, at least, years) when you can just take a supplement? Why do hard work and actually learn when you can look at cool images on Instagram or read a short blurb from a person who’s famous for being famous (and has the social media following to prove it)?

Because we can get ahead without having to endure the work that gets us ahead.

We want results without having to produce them.

It’s a deal we just can’t pass up.

Yet, having a proper sense of proportion may reveal the fragility of immediate, singular answers and products. When you look at the shortcut in the grand scheme of the marathon of your life, the impulsive ease we gravitate toward is revealed as a temporary, flawed replica of the real.

We may, therefore, be more likely to endure the process of a shift with a slow slog of a transition where, step by step, the entirety of an experience is being altered.

And I think this approach provides what the commodities of easy answers and magic pills cannot.

Part Four — The Difference of Real

While I would certainly love the sociological adventure of wondering what factors are at play in this culture of ours, I’ll leave that to your own imagination. Certainly, everyone from Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and the Frankfurt School to Confucius, Laozi, or even Voltaire would be quick to expose how much our individualism and economic objectification goes into creating a market built on such a sordid lie about humanity, in general, and change, in particular. It’s good business.

And if we have a market of products, slickly advertised, in order to bypass the difficult process of being human (all while padding the bank accounts of those who happen to sell them), we might want to give some thought as to how we can sociologically and economically avoid the problem of blind participation and uncritical acceptance.

I do believe the goals of profit and ease glamorously shine in a culture centered on the individual as opposed to a goal of health, even collective health. Those goals (profit and ease versus health) might even be mutually exclusive. In the marathon of life, profit and ease are the shortcuts that exclude the benefits of actually running the race; and lead to the invention of products like the shake weight.

Our invitation, call it counter-cultural, is to really run the marathon.

Because it offers something that cutting through the business plaza cannot.

Real ribs smoked with real fire and smoke (not that liquid smoke rubbish) offers something that microwaves cannot.

Or, more to the point, I have a printed replica of Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” in my office and I can’t help but be disappointed. Because to see the real thing with the nuances of the paint strokes and thick lines protruding from the artist’s hand simply offers something that a printer with RBG ink can’t.

Real, my friends, is not always glamorous.

But it is beautiful.

Actual transformation is calling us into what is real.