Last weekend, I ran a 10k cross at Bucharest Half Marathon, 3 years after running my first one. While running, music blasting in my headphones, I realised something strange: despite a terrible night’s sleep, I was about to hit a personal best. And that thought stopped me in my tracks. Four years ago, I could barely get off the couch without back pain. Today, I run distances I once considered impossible, just for fun. 

The contrast made me realise, once again, how much we underestimate the power of discipline, consistency, and showing up when things get tough. We love talking about talent, luck, and “overnight success.” But most extraordinary outcomes are built quietly, through thousands of unremarkable decisions repeated consistently over time.

This is something I spoke about during my TEDx Iași talk last year (embedded below for the Romanian speaking readers). Because behind every polished success story is usually a much messier reality: doubt, discomfort, setbacks, sacrifice, persistence.

From the outside, my life might look enviable. I built a global career in tech, I travel the world with my family and I train on a daily basis. Sounds perfect, doesn’t it? It might. But that’s the curated version. 

What you rarely see on anyone’s Instagram reels is the reality underneath it: the work, the discipline, the consistency, the ambition, the sacrifices. The nights spent wide awake, full of doubts. The days when you genuinely want to quit.

As Steve Jobs said in his famous commencement speech at Stanford University, you can only connect the dots looking backwards. When you’re living through the moments, nothing is ever as clear as it looks in retrospect. This is why I choose to talk time and again about the reality behind the instagram reels. And this reality is oftentimes painful, but it is very, very real.

The Myth of Talent

Here’s something I’ll admit: most of the time, in most rooms I’ve walked into, I haven’t been the most talented person there. Not at work. Not as a parent, when I had absolutely no idea what I was doing when our son came into our lives. And definitely not in sports, where I heard ever since I was a kid that I am “an anti-talent at anything that doesn’t involve someone else running on my behalf”.

What I did have though is something that many people around me didn’t: I showed up. Every single time. Even when I felt out of place. When I was the slowest in the room. Or when the odds were objectively not in my favour.

Truth is we love to glorify talent. We put talented people on a pedestal and assume they were born with something special that the rest of us lack. They’re “the chosen ones.” Destined for greatness. We are the rest.

Except that in reality, most “talented” people aren’t necessarily better wired than the rest of us. What often looks like a talent gap is actually a focus gap. A discipline gap. A consistency gap.

I’ve worked with hundreds of exceptional people throughout my career. The ones who delivered the best results weren’t always the smartest. Nor the fastest. But they were, without exception, the ones working the hardest. The most resilient. The ones having grit and willing to keep going when things got hard and everyone else was already pulling back. No magic wand. No stroke of brilliance. Just discipline.

Talent gives you a head start. Discipline and consistency get you across the finish line. Not all of us have the chance to start from pole-position. But this doesn’t matter. It’s discipline and consistency that help you get through the finish line.

A famous quote says that “when you really want something, the entire Universe conspires for you to achieve it”. It might be tempting to believe that the Universe is really concerned about Irina from Romania and it conspires for me to build a career in tech, succeed at my job, or change my lifestyle. But it’s also wishful thinking. 

We would all reach our goals all of the time if the Universe would conspire for us. Just that, spoiler alert, it doesn’t. So what are we left with? How do we make that lemonade that everyone talks about, when life gives you lemons? There are a couple of things that worked for me. (Spoiler alert again: manifesting is not one of them)

1. Stop Complaining. Start Acting.

The first step is to stop self-loathing. Nobody likes a complainer. And I have good news and bad news. You decide which is which.

Life is hard. And then you die.

And things rarely go as you hope they would.

I will share a story with you. On December 4th, 2017, I was leading Uber’s marketing team in Romania, working on regional projects, doing work I genuinely loved with a great team and a fantastic manager. My professional life was exactly where I wanted it to be.

On December 5th, the team no longer existed. Global leadership had decided to centralise operations. The job I loved was gone overnight, and with it, my equilibrium. I did what came naturally. I complained and played the victim.

In a 1:1 with my manager I told her that I don’t know how we’ll get through this, because I don’t see a way out. Her response stuck with me. It was, looking back, the last time I let myself wallow.

“Do we have a problem? OK. What’s the solution? If there is no solution, then we don’t have a problem: this is the new status quo and we’ll learn to live with it. Complaining won’t make things easier. Quite on the contrary. It’ll keep us from focusing on what actually matters: deciding on the best next step forward.”

Victimhood is comfortable because it reduces your sense of responsibility. And yes, many things in life are outside your control. But you always control how you respond to what’s happening to you. You always have a choice.

So make the decision today: stop feeling sorry for yourself. Do something instead.

2. No Excuses

We’re all experts at this one.

I’m really tired today. My kid woke me up five times last night. I’m not feeling well. I’ll start on Monday. Or in January. When the conditions are perfect. Just that the perfect conditions never arrive. That’s not how life works.

The summer of 2022 was the lowest point in my adult life. I was close to burnout, eating badly, sleeping poorly, and working ineffectively. I weighed over 100kg and was running on empty.

In a feedback conversation, someone on my team told me:

 “Irina, you’re an extraordinary leader, but there’s a problem: you can’t sustain your energy levels. You come back recharged, but it doesn’t last. Have you tried exercising?”

My answer came in an instant. I found all the excuses you can possibly think of: 

“Look, I genuinely don’t have time. You know my schedule, my responsibilities, my kid, my post-pregnancy weight…”. Insert here every single thing that could prevent me from actually exercising.

Natalia smiled and asked me one simple question: “Do you have time to shower every day?”

That hit hard.

She continued: 

“Exercise isn’t optional. Movement is basic health hygiene. And if you don’t take care of yourself, you will never reach your full potential as a professional.”

She sent me a Harvard Business Review article on the making of the “corporate athlete”, backed by data, making the case for the ancient principle of mens sana in corpore sano.

My life splits into a clear before and after from that conversation.

I started on the elliptical bike. Then I ran. 150 metres. Then 300. A kilometre. Ten. Fifteen. Three years later, I’ve lost almost 30 kilograms, and I’ve run out of excuses too.

Excuses don’t move you forward. They push your goals further away. Whatever you want to change: start now.

3. There are no shortcuts

More bad news still to come: “overnight success” takes years. Sometimes decades.

People ask me all the time what are the “growth hacks” that I used with my teams, curious to discover our playbooks. Spoiler alert: the magic growth strategy doesn’t exist, so we can all just stop looking for it. What my teams did instead was deploy hundreds of tactics with velocity, experiment voraciously, iterate quickly and learn through a relentless cycle of trial and error. No secret sauce. No shortcut. Just hard work. 

My physical transformation started four years ago. It took six months to reach a healthy weight. A year to run my first 10K. Another year to change the last digit on the scale. And for more than a year now, I’ve been working on body recomposition, a process that is slow, non-linear, and will never fully be “done.” I will always be work in process. Personally and professionally.

That’s what real growth looks like. Whether it’s personal or professional: It’s slow. It’s non-linear. It’s uncomfortable. And it’s full of days when you seriously question what you were thinking when you started. Some days you take big leaps. Most days you just drag yourself forward.

Slow doesn’t mean weak. It means sustainable.

4. Embrace the pain

Something I understood quite late is that discomfort is part of the deal. It’s not a sign you’re doing it wrong. It’s a sign you’re evolving.

When children grow, they experience muscle cramps in their bodies. We popularly call them “growing pains”. When we lift weights, we create micro-tears in our muscles. They hurt. And then they grow back stronger through repair. On long runs, the last few kilometres are always painful. Every step, your brain tells you to stop. And yet, you keep going.

There is no transformation without discomfort. And while I am not particularly fond of the “no pain, no gain” mantra and I don’t think we should be actively seeking pain, we should definitely not avoid it either.

You don’t get strong by avoiding pain. You get strong by learning to manage it. And sometimes, you’ll surprise yourself realising you learned to cope with it with a smile, knowing the satisfaction that comes after.

5. Just Keep Going

Consistency isn’t sexy. Nor glamorous. But it’s magic.

You don’t need perfect days. You just need to show up. To keep going when things get tough. Particularly, when things get tough. 

Train. Work. Write the next paragraph. Send the proposal you’ve been putting off. Eat one healthy meal. Try again. Put one foot in front of the other, as best as you can. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be.

The Japanese have a word for this: 

Kaizen. 

It means continuous improvement through small, consistent steps. It is very different from the Western “New Year, New Me” mindset. Just small steps, repeated consistently. The progress is almost invisible day to day. But it exists. And it compounds: just like interest. Or calories. Or excuses, if you let them pile up.

Kaizen is the principle that helped me build my career. It’s the principle that underpins my lifestyle change. 

If you work a little every single day, showing up in whatever way you can, you become unstoppable.

What Showing Up Actually Means

Showing up doesn’t mean the absence of discomfort. It means accepting the discomfort and moving forward anyway.

It means choosing small, steady steps over waiting for a perfect leap. Choosing progress over perfection. Choosing resilience over talent.

My life didn’t change in a single dramatic moment. It changed in thousands of small moments no one else saw:

• With every honest choice and every wrong decision
• With every step forward and all the steps back
• With every hard conversation
• With every done workout and every missed run
• With every healthy meal and every cheat day

None of them was essential on its own. But together, they brought me here. I love Kaizen for one thing above all: it teaches you that small things don’t feel much… until the day they actually become exceptional.

You don’t have to be extraordinary to change your life. You become extraordinary in the process of changing it, little by little. So stop waiting for the right moment. Stop waiting for motivation, or talent, or a stroke of genius.

Work hard. Be persistent. Put one foot in front of the other. Just show up, when things get tough. And you’ll find that what once seemed impossible becomes your reality.