There Is No Quick Fix! Just Keep Living & Things Will Make Sense

Written By Caroline Smith

My Grandma Ann always tells me, “Just keep living, and it’ll all make sense.” That's what inspired this episode, which is all about the myth of quick fixes for every problem in life. In the current age of instant gratification and high-tech smartphones that give us quick and easy access to everything 24/7, it can be hard to “trust the process” without expecting everything to happen right away. We order things from Amazon overnight, we pay other people to do our grocery shopping so that we can sleep in, and of course we expect to see the fruits of our labor immediately.

The tough truth is that no matter how many technological advances we make for ourselves, we can’t always find quick fixes for the struggles we face in life — at least not without some downsides. So, in this episode, I’ll talk about why quick fixes aren’t always the best solution and I’ll share a 4-step solution you can use to stop rushing the process and instead trust the process, all tied together with my Grandma’s age-old advice, “Just keep living, and it will all make sense.”

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Transcript:

Welcome to The Introverted Misfit Podcast with me, Caroline Smith, where we discuss topics related to the human experience of connection and communication with a slightly awkward, introverted twist.

I don’t know how many of you listening are into gardening, but when I first got into gardening a few years ago, I remember planting my first cucumber plants in a container on the patio of my apartment, and I was so excited for the cucumbers to grow that I literally kept going outside just to look at them like once every 2 hours. No exaggeration.

And of course that was completely unnecessary and unhelpful, and I knew that even while I was doing it, but this is the concept that today’s podcast will be about, which is what I call the myth of quick fixes for every problem in our lives, and how we can stop trying to rush the process of life, and instead trust the process, or if you’re like me and grew up in church all my life, I’ve heard people say, “God’s timing is not our timing.”

There’s probably a million different clever ways people have said what I’m trying to convey in this episode, but you get the picture.

Someone gave me some advice a few months ago that has really been sticking in my mind and keeping me motivated, and so I figured that’s a sign that some of you need to hear this, which is really the inspiration for today’s episode.

When I first started my coaching business and this podcast in early 2024, I had about a 2-hour long conversation with a mentor who is a much more experienced entrepreneur, who graciously took the time to steer me in the right direction.

She ended our conversation with just one sentence that I will never forget: “There’s just something about your generation that expects everything to happen right away, and it just doesn’t work that way. Things like this take time, consistency, and perseverance.”

When she was referring to my generation, she means Gen Z which is people born between the years 1997 and 2012. I’m 26, by the way.

And if you didn’t know, one popular nickname for Generation Z is “Generation Now,” which basically emphasizes our preference for instant gratification and our fast-paced nature.

If you ask me that’s a pretty accurate representation of us which I can humbly admit.

It makes perfect sense because we were the first generation in which smartphones and things like social media and instant messaging were a major part of our childhoods, so we really grew up with having a computer in our pockets that gave us access to a world of information at our fingertips.

And of course now, pretty much every one in every generation is used to instant gratification because of the tech advances we’ve seen:

DoorDash, Amazon overnight shipping, you don’t even have to leave your house to go grocery shopping now!

Instead of taking the time to get dressed, get in the car, drive to the store, walk through the aisles, stand in line, and then come back, you can tap a button on your phone and have it delivered while you sleep in a little later.

Or if you’re like me, I don’t even think I left my left my house to go Christmas shopping just last month.

I did all of it online in like 30 minutes, whereas when I was growing up, I remember Christmas shopping used to be a whole family ordeal, and it was actually kind of fun!

My parents and my sisters would put on warm clothes, and then go to the nearest outlet mall about 1 hour away, and for a few hours, we would buy all of our presents.

So we really are living in a microwave society where everything just happens so fast that you are accustomed to immediate results.

This whole concept reminds me of this saying my grandma tells me all the time: “Just keep living, and it’ll all make sense.”

She says this in response to a lot of different things, like a sometimes, she’ll complain about her knees and her back hurting because she’s in her 90s, and she’ll say something like, “I know you don’t understand now because you’re young and healthy, but just keep living.”

But, she’ll also say it in response to questions I have that I want an answer to or things that don’t have a quick fix.

It’s kind of like what Dorothy from Finding Nemo says, “Just keep swimming,” which is really talking about persevering through hard times.

I think what my grandma means when she says this is that life is for living and learning.

In other words, experiencing things and events as they happen to us, learning the lessons that need to be learned, and applying that wisdom moving forward.

You’re not going to have all of the answers right now, or get everything you want right now.

And in some cases, you may think one way right now about something, and then 10 years later you’ve completely changed your mind about that same thing and you’re saying to yourself, “What in the world was I thinking?”

I remember being in college, maybe 20 or 21, and one of sisters was telling me about a really bad breakup she just had with her boyfriend at the time.

Keep in mind, there is a 12 year age gap between her and I, so she’s got a lot more life experience than I do.

And you know, at 21, your frontal lobe — the part of the brain that makes decisions for you, or what I like to call the “common sense” part of your brain — it’s not fully developed yet, so at that age I was still very naive about a lot of things, and I remember trying to convince my sister that if both of them really loved each other, they could make it work.

And she just looked at me and laughed, basically trying to tell me, “You have no idea what you’re talking about and you’ve got a lot more living and learning to do.”

Sure enough, all these years later, I completely understand what she’s talking about.

But it took time and lived experience for me to finally understand that love is indeed not enough to make a relationship work.

It takes a lot more than that, contrary to what fairytales portray.

Or sometimes you can’t understand people’s true intentions until some time has passed and things start to make sense.

Or any other situation you think of where the puzzle pieces all start to fit together after years of you not knowing the answers.

Just keep living, and you’ll see.

This reminds me of my past battle with my mental health. If you’ve been following my podcast for a while you probably have heard me talk about my journey of overcoming social anxiety, which is something I struggled with for many years.

By the way, I’m not a mental health professional, so what I’m about to tell you is purely my experience and not to be taken as medical advice.

My social anxiety was built over time mainly because of social rejection and social exclusion, but also some outright bullying by kids in middle and high school.

I talk about my experience with being bullied in much more detail in my earlier episodes titled “When Being Bullied as a Kid Makes You an Emotionally Withdrawn Adult,” but to give you a quick summary, I am on the autism spectrum which made socializing and making friends really difficult for me (that’s what was causing the social anxiety), and I was having a lot of cultural estrangement issues with the other black kids in my school which is really a whole different story.

Those were the two primary reasons I had so many issues.

My journey of overcoming that mental battle was not a quick overnight process.

I mean, I know that I’ve kind of boiled it down into a strategy in my 12-week coaching program, Communicate With Quiet Confidence, which turns shy, awkward introverts into socially confident introverts.

The link to that program is in the description of this episode if you want to learn more about it and book your free discovery call with me.

But what I was saying is that the strategy and the framework in my program is really just you living your life as you normally do with me guiding and supporting you when you encounter those same issues of low self-esteem, imposter syndrome, social awkwardness, etc., that have been holding you back from your transformation.

And that’s basically what I did on my social confidence journey: I kept living my life, went to work, went to church, went to holiday gatherings, went to the grocery store, but the only difference is that I lived with the intention of overcoming my social anxiety.

And that was not a quick fix, but it was the long-term solution that I knew would stick with me for the long run.

I just kept living, and I figured it out, with the help of my counselor and my family.

So now I want to move to the portion of this episode where I tell you my best advice for how to stop rushing to figure everything out right now, how to trust the process without freaking out about everything, and hopefully you can apply it to whatever that “process” is for you or whatever trial you’re going through during this time.

  1. Remember that good things take time.

    If you try to rush through those big trials and obstacles in life, it’s going to be more difficult to manage and you’ll end up burnt out, so it’s important to find a good pace that works for you and your life.

    When I was in middle school, I ran on the cross-country team, which please do not ask me to run ANYTHING these days because I was way more in shape back then.

    One of the tips our coach gave us was not to start off the race with a pace that is too fast because you’re going to tire yourself out and you won’t have any energy towards the end when you need to speed up and cross the finish line.

    Life is a marathon, and you have to find a good pace that you can manage and that’s kind of how I think of going through life’s trials and obstacles.

    I’ve got another good example to tell you, too:

    So during my first day at my first full-time job as a web developer, I was shadowing one of the more experienced product specialists, and he was one of those people who just excelled at his job.

    Like I had no idea someone could be so motivated and interested in construction software, but he was and he knew all the ends and out of everything, and he was always asking me very intriguing and thought-provoking questions.

    One of the question I remember went something like this:

    “What do you think is more dangerous for contractors (our clients): business growing too fast or business growing too slowly?”

    The correct answer was “growing too fast,” which if you don’t know any better like me at the time, that answer sounded crazy.

    I was like how can a business grow “too fast”? Doesn’t more business equal more money?

    Not necessarily, it turns out, because when a business takes on more than it can handle, employees get overwhelmed because they don’t have the time or resources to handle the huge influx of clients, then that leads to the quality of the service going down, which means unhappy customers, a damaged reputation because unhappy customers talk more than happy ones, and ultimately lost profit.

    So the moral of both stories is that good things take time to grow, and you just have to remember that when you’re in the midst of life’s trials.

  2. Celebrate the small victories.

    If you’re waiting until the final victory or result before you celebrate, it’s going to be hard for you to stay motivated and see the progress that you’re making.

    So it’s important to take time and celebrate the small victories of life.

    When you pay off that credit card debt that’s been keeping you from building your savings, celebrate. Even if the final goal is to buy a house or something, celebrate the small victory, because you can’t get to the final victory without the small ones.

    When you made a good impression in that work meeting and the boss applauded you, celebrate, even though the pay raise hasn’t come yet.

    When I was trying to overcome social anxiety, I would have a mini-celebration every time I conquered my fear of a social interaction that I had been dreading.

    So like if I had a conversation in the grocery store that went really well, where I didn’t say anything weird or awkward, I would have an internal happy moment in the car.

    My point is the big victories don’t happen overnight, so you have to celebrate the small wins to stay positive and motivated.

  3. Don’t let setbacks derail you.

    This is a big one because it can be really easy to let those moments of failure get to you and make you give up.

    I encourage you to remember how resilient you are.

    I think as humans, we were built for overcoming life’s trials in some amazing ways.

    That includes overcoming roadblocks, death of loved ones, sickness, breakups, financial problems, and all of the other incredibly stressful things that are part of the human experience.

    I’m not saying that these struggles are fair or should happen at all, but the fact is they do happen.

    Humans have been facing issues like these and worse since the beginning of time.

    Something else my grandma always says is, “There is nothing new under the sun.”

    Every challenge you think is unique to you, someone has already gone through it, is going through it right now, and will go through it in the future.

    So when you start to feel unmotivated by setbacks, remember that this is temporary if you can just get through it to see what’s on the other side, you’ll be glad you did.

    In other words, “Just keep living and you’ll see.”

  4. Have a solid support system.

    The whole premise of my podcast is talking about the importance of healthy social and relational skills because human connection is one of the primary ways we can thrive, and that’s because life is already pretty difficult but it is 10x more difficult when you’re doing it alone without people who care about you.

    And when you are going through life’s trials and obstacles, your support system has the ability to motivate you when you’re discouraged, support you when you need it, and help you find your way when you need clarity.

    I’ve talked a lot on my podcast about how having autism and social anxiety really impacted my ability to create and maintain relationships, and because of that, I didn’t have many good friends during school.

    I definitely had 2 or 3 really good friends in high school from being in concert and marching band, but unless we were in that band class, I was pretty helpless and would just sit alone not bothering to talk to anyone.

    And needless to say the entire 5 years I was in college, I didn’t make any friends until the last semester of my senior year in college when I met 2 people who I studied with on a regular basis.

    And then after college of course most of us went our separate ways and lost touch, although the good news is that since becoming socially confident and overcoming social anxiety, I’ve been able to rekindle a few of those relationships from school which has been really fulfilling for me.

    So until I was able to confidently build my own support system which didn’t happen until like 2 years ago, my family really served as that primary support for me even in my early adulthood, and they were really the main reason I was able to get through those obstacles.

    I cannot imagine how much more difficult and demotivating it would’ve been if I didn’t have them with me, which just goes to show you the value of a good support system when you are going through those trials that don’t have a quick fix and that really take perseverance, endurance, accountability, discipline, and all of those other big important words.

    When you’re about to do something really stupid that’s not good for you, you have people who you can call to talk you off the ledge; when you’re feeling really disappointed because you didn’t get the job you interviewed for; when things didn’t work out with that person who you were so in love with; when someone close to you dies and you’re grieving; all of these are normal scenarios in life that we’ll all have to face one day or another, and you do not want to go through them alone.

    So, definitely keeps those valuable people in your life close to the best of your ability, and if you’re anything like I used to be and are having trouble finding friends and acquaintances because you’re shy, socially awkward, maybe you’re autistic like I am, check out my 1-on-1 coaching services specifically for shy, awkward introverts who want to become socially confident while still being themselves.

    That includes my signature 12-week coaching program, Communicate With Quiet Confidence, or if you don’t need the entire 12-week program and just want to talk about 1 or 2 things going on in your life right now that are negatively impacting your self-esteem and social confidence, whether it’s some insecurities you’ve been trying to get over, or a fear of rejection that’s keeping you stuck, or maybe a really awkward moment you had with a coworker that you can’t stop thinking about, check out my 60-Minute Social Confidence Booster, which is great for addressing just those 1 or 2 problems you just need someone to help you through.

That’s all for today’s episode.

As always, if you enjoyed this talk, please don’t forget to hit the follow or subscribe button, leave a review and/or comment whether you’re tuning in on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts from, and share this podcast with a friend.

Thanks for listening, and have a great day!

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Caroline Smith

Caroline is the founder of The Introverted Misfit, a community committed to helping socially inept people become more socially confident in themselves.

https://theintrovertedmisfit.com
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