Skip to main content
NikoFischer.com

Main navigation

  • Home
  • About
    • My Reading List
    • Recommended Youtube Channels
    • Life Rules
    • Podcast
  • 50-Day Challenge
  • Impressum
Sprachumschalter
  • German
  • English

Breadcrumb

  1. Home

Sunday thoughts: The effort is enough

🎸
🚀 Beta Running

PYNGUP: Rebellion against toxic productivity

Beta limited to 100 spots. Tasks become social commitments instead of lonely to-dos.

🚀 Join Beta 📖 Read Story "€487 wasted"
By Niko, 5 September, 2021

For a few days I have been carrying a quote around with me: "The effort is enough". I got it from the book "Ego is the enemy" by Ryan Holiday. It's a fantastic sentence that exudes incredible serenity.

This quote means that success should be measured by the effort we put into our goals, rather than merely looking at the outcome. And this basically aligns with my view of goals: focus on the things you have control over, rather than things that are out of your control.

Making a video that you can be proud of yourself is 100% in your control. However, you have no control over whether your video gets over 1 million views on YouTube and goes viral. As a software developer, I have full control over programming software that I like and that serves my purposes. But I have no control over whether that software or app gets listed on the bestseller list of app stores and generates thousands of downloads. It's up to me whether I write this blog post or write an entire book. But whether I win the Pulitzer Prize with it is beyond my control.

The quote generally reminds me of the serenity of the Stoics and Epictetus' famous phrase: "The way to happiness is not to worry about anything that is beyond our control."

The phrase "the effort is enough" gives me pause for a moment and helps me to refocus on the thing itself. Rather enjoying the journey instead of just focusing on the destination. If we finally get to the destination of our goals, then we are just there. Most of the time, however, we are wandering along the path. And it is this path and the journey that we should enjoy.

Things I've done in the last week

Drone project: I continue to work on my DIY camera drone: currently I'm developing a landing gear. The challenge here: I want to attach a gimbal for a GoPro underneath the drone and here the feet of the landing gear should not be visible in the field of view of the camera.

Article: I wrote a post about my 3 most important productivity rules that help me move my projects forward more effectively.

Quote of the week

I've never tried this before, so I'm totally confident I can do it.

- Pippi Longstocking

Song of the Week

Tags

  • Sunday thoughts

Comments

About text formats

Restricted HTML

  • Allowed HTML tags: <em> <strong> <cite> <blockquote cite> <code> <ul type> <ol start type> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <h2 id> <h3 id> <h4 id> <h5 id> <h6 id>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Web page addresses and email addresses turn into links automatically.

Related articles

Sunday thoughts 1

About the author

Nikolai Fischer is the founder of Kommune3 (since 2007) and a leading expert in Drupal development and tech entrepreneurship. With 17+ years of experience, he has led hundreds of projects and achieved #1 on Hacker News. As host of the "Kommit mich" podcast and founder of skillution, he combines technical expertise with entrepreneurial thinking. His articles about Supabase, modern web development, and systematic problem-solving have influenced thousands of developers worldwide.

Ihre Anmeldung konnte nicht gespeichert werden. Bitte versuchen Sie es erneut.
Ihre Anmeldung war erfolgreich.

Newsletter

Join a growing community of friendly readers. From time to time I share my thoughts about rational thinking, productivity and life.

Nikolai Fischer

✌ Hi, I'm Niko
Entrepreneur, developer & podcaster

Contact me:

  • E-Mail
  • Phone
  • LinkedIn

My Reading List

  • $100M Leads: How to Get Strangers To Want To Buy Your Stuff - Alex Hormozi
  • Quantitative Trading: How to Build Your Own Algorithmic Trading Business (Wiley Trading) - Ernest P. Chan
  • Hands-On Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading: Design and implement investment strategies based on smart algorithms that learn from data using Python - Stefan Jansen
  • Algorithmic Trading - Ernie Chan
  • Let Me Tell You a Story: Tales Along the Road to Happiness - Jorge Bucay
more
RSS feed