Worldline 1%

An aerial competition is no different from any other sport, any other contest, and, depending on how one chooses to see it, from human history itself. Talent and effort may raise the odds of victory, but they do not guarantee it. In the end, the one who wins is not always the most talented, nor the one who has worked the hardest, nor simply the strongest. Accidents happen, circumstances shift beyond anyone’s control, and winners and losers exchange places with dizzying speed.
That uncertainty is part of what makes it interesting, and for that very reason, to regard victory alone as the reward is a narrow way of thinking, and, as an investment, a risky one.

Reward. I once gave, as an example of a belief that helps one improve in aerial, the idea that hard work is always rewarded. It may look like nothing more than a simple-minded creed of grit, but in fact it is almost impossible to refute, and logically correct.

So long as you seek the reward of effort in winning a prize, in victory, in the esteem of others, that effort may indeed go unrewarded. But if the reward is your own growth itself, and the proper comparison is with the version of yourself in the worldline where you made no such effort, then your effort will be rewarded without fail. If you compare the self who did nothing today with the self who went to practice, then however slight the difference may be, it follows that the latter has advanced.

In that sense, treating the version of yourself in the worldline where you did not make such effort as your own private control group can itself become a powerful belief, a useful way of seeing the world, and one that directly helps you improve.
From that standpoint, there is no need to undergo some dramatic evolution every day. You only need to create, however slightly, a difference from the self who did nothing.

Everyone has their own hell, and there are days when merely being alive already feels like existing inside some form of psychological torture, when the body will not move from the bed at all. I’m tired, I’m sleepy, I can’t be bothered, you think, and second by second time itself changes into a bed of sharp needles, thrusting upward into the inert body and mind from below. And it does so without delivering the final blow, choosing instead to prolong only the pain and the restless agitation, slowly and with care.
Even then, it only has to be the slightest amount, just 1% each day. If aerial is what you do, then it is enough simply to go to the studio and change clothes. If even that is too much, then something even smaller still will do. That effort is already rewarded in that alone.

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Of course, it is not healthy to give up pursuing objective victory altogether, step down from competition, and grow small and self-abasing, so it is better to know victory too. But the narrow belief that victory alone is the reward cannot sustain you in a world as uncertain as this, unless you were to believe, more deeply than objective truth itself, in whatever lie is needed to save you.

Besides, it just feels good to do something not to show it to someone or be praised for it, but simply because it is fundamental to who you are.
The wish to have your achievements recognized probably lives (to some extent) in everyone. But further down that path of pursuing nothing but the evaluations and approval of others, what waits, sooner or later, is the emptiness of a heart that will never stay full.
Then perhaps the surest way to keep walking through this uncertain world is to recognize, as the purest reward, those minute increments of growth that make your own heart dance, those tiny steps that, to anyone else, would look almost indistinguishable from doing nothing at all, those changes so small that no one in the world but you would ever notice them.