In the Chase of Greatness, What You Want Is What You Don’t Get

It’s been a while.
I’m writing this after crossing my second retail milestone: 80 million+ IDR in revenue.
That number alone is surreal — it’s officially more than what I make in my full-time job.

But the title of this post sums up the entire year for me:
In the chase of greatness, what you want is what you don’t get.

And strangely, that realization has been one of the most freeing things I’ve learned.

The Catapult Moment

This year felt like being pulled backwards in a catapult — stretched, uncomfortable, tense — before being launched forward.
I had goals stacked on goals:
Revenue numbers.
Income targets.
Sales conversions.
Running distances.
Body weight.
Everything had a number next to it, and ironically, the numbers worked against me.

Every year since 2021, I’ve written “Run a 10K” as a goal.
Every year, I somehow didn’t hit it.

But something shifted this year.
Not in a dramatic, movie-like way — more in the “I finally stopped lying to myself” kind of way.

After years of running inconsistently, stopping and starting, treating it like a KPI instead of something I actually enjoy… I finally broke past my long-time 5K wall.

I ran 8 km in about an hour.
Slow, imperfect, but mine.
And it only happened after I stopped obsessing over distances and started focusing on understanding why the habit never stuck in the first place.

When You Stop Forcing It, You Start Learning

Let me be blunt:
I’ve been stupid about this.

Chasing goals so hard that you forget the reason behind them is a dumb way to live.
But that’s exactly what I did — and what a lot of us do.

Only when I finally paused — when I stopped treating everything like a race — did my mind open up. Suddenly, advice from people more accomplished than me didn’t feel like criticism. I stopped making excuses about genes, time, or circumstances.

Instead, I finally understood the simplest truth:
People ahead of you give advice because they know you can apply it.
They see potential you’re too busy to notice in yourself.

That’s reality.
Not ego.
Not ambition without execution.
Just reality — and learning to accept myself exactly where I am, not where I pretend I should be.

The Year of Breaking Highs… While Being Imperfect

Here’s the funny part:
This year, I broke more personal records than ever before.

✔ Revenue highs
✔ Running highs
✔ Personal income highs

And yet… my discipline was objectively bad.

Waking up late.
Procrastinating.
10+ hours of screen time.
Messy routines.

If anything, this year showed me that I’m still operating far below my actual potential — and that’s encouraging. Because it means there’s so much room to grow.

The Real Lesson

What I’ve learned is this:

In the chase of greatness, what you want is what you don’t get.
When you chase the result, the result runs away.

But when you chase understanding —
why you fail,
why you fall off the habit,
why you avoid the hard things —
that’s when you start moving forward again.

And when the catapult finally releases, you move faster than you ever imagined.