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What does it take to be successful?
(You might not want to hear this.)
The steps to achieve real success aren’t sexy.
You’ll have to replace your rose-colored glasses for a less sparkly reality.
You’ll have to trade comfort for blood, sweat, and tears.
You’ll want to quit more times than you’ll be able to count, but in the end, it’ll be worth it.
Embrace these hard truths to accomplish any goal. ⬇️
“Overnight success” takes a decade
I teach writers to improve their skills, make money online, and build a career as a full-time writer. I give them an exercise that gives them the mindset they’ll need to be successful.
Here’s what I tell them to do:
Go to the archives of your favorite writer or content creator and see just how long they’ve been working on their craft. The answer is almost always between 5 to 10 years, often ten-plus years or decades.
It helps them lose the get-rich-quick mentality you see so often when it comes to projects like starting an online business, becoming a content creator, or investing time into learning a new skill.
Tony Robbins has a quote:
Most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year, but underestimate what they can achieve in two or three decades.
If they don’t get results fast enough they quit. Either that or they try to pivot to the new shiny object of the day, which means they never make serious progress.
Skills compound just like money in an investment account. If you work on the same skill over and over again, you’ll get better, but not at the same rate at each interval.
For a while, it will feel pointless. You’ll have to put in a ton of effort just to get a mediocre result. But one day, out of nowhere, you’ll experience an exponential jump in your results.
I made almost no money in the first three years of my writing career. Then, in the fourth year, I made more money than the previous three years of my work history combined.
I’m reminded of another quote:
Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Step by step you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts. But you build discipline by preparing for fast spurts… Slug it out one inch at a time, day by day, and at the end of the day—if you live long enough—most people get what they deserve.
—Charlie Munger
If you’ve ever seen someone at the top of their game who seems like they have it all, just realize there were years where they went step by step without getting ahead in fast spurts. They were doing the work behind the scenes for years, but you didn’t become aware of them until just now, because they finally hit their exponential jump. What looks like an overnight success is the result of relentless work for long periods.
You can define success with two words: delayed gratification.
Answer this question to become successful
Are you willing to pay the price?
If you’ve always wondered what success looks like, there’s your answer. It looks like sacrifice.
If you’re willing to pay the price, you’ll probably achieve it. If you’re not willing to pay the price, then don’t even try in the first place.
Too many gurus will try to twist your arm into becoming this great person.
Be honest with yourself about whether or not that’s something you actually want. And figure out if you want it badly enough.
If you want to get in amazing shape, the price is sometimes giving up delicious foods and putting in hours at the gym every week without fail.
If you want to build a business, the price is working extra hours on top of your day job, not making much money at first, and going through the psychological pain and turmoil it takes to build something.
Level up the goal and the higher the price you’ll have to pay.
Maybe you can build a million-dollar business with 40 hours of work per week. But if you want to start the next great unicorn company, plan on not having a social life at all and working 14-hour days for a decade.
We all come with different levels of ambition, tastes, and most importantly a tolerance for suffering. Now, you can go many rungs higher than you’re accustomed to, but you have to make up your mind that you’re willing to climb and do what it takes.
Related:
You don’t just get to “do what you love”
When people imagine what success looks like, they often envision a life where they spend time doing exactly what they want to do. You can build a life that operates this way, but every path to success requires some things that just aren’t that fun. Especially at the beginning of whatever mission you’re trying to complete.
I love to write. I don’t love doing tech stuff on my website, keeping track of my finances, sending out individualized emails to pitch my work, dealing with rude customers, or answering a bunch of emails.
But these things are part of the gig, and I’m willing to do them because they help me do what I love.
Personally, I love to work out. Others struggle with it. Well, if you want to have a healthy enough body to enjoy your success, you have to grind it out at the gym even if you don’t love it.
There are a lot of things I love to do that are bad for me. I love eating junk food and watching endless hours of TV. I enjoy a night of drinking. But, to achieve my highest goals in life, I have to moderate or ditch those habits altogether.
I’m all about finding your purpose and living a life of passion, but too many people confuse that with only doing what you love. All the time. Their obsession with pleasure prevents them from achieving the true happiness that comes with living a life of meaning and purpose.
Related:
To become successful, be honest with yourself
Most people, even self-aware people—even me—underestimate just how much we lie to ourselves.
We make tons of rationalizations to help us cope. We pretend not to want what we really want because we’re afraid of being judged. Instead of having an honest assessment of ourselves, we either fall too deep into self-doubt and limiting beliefs or we have an overinflated sense of our abilities.
Yes, you do need irrational levels of confidence to achieve lofty goals, but, in the present moment, you need to be pragmatic and objective. You can have huge goals yet understand you’re currently not the type of person who’s capable of reaching those goals. There’s a way to work on yourself without beating yourself up about your flaws.
We all define success differently, so don’t skip this step:
Cold, rational, and objective self-assessment—to the point of brutal honesty—is one of the most useful (and least used) methods to get what you want. Knowing yourself will help you identify what’s most important, set goals, and lay the groundwork for becoming successful.
It’s hard to face yourself in the mirror and be honest about your life. It’s hard to admit you’ve made mistakes, especially big ones. If you want to dig yourself out of a hole, you have to first admit you’re in one so you can stop digging.
Be objective about your strengths and weaknesses. Instead of trying to be something you’re not, enhance your strengths or mitigate your weaknesses.
For example, outsource work to others who have the talent you don’t. Some of your weaknesses are true handicaps and others are skills you can dramatically improve with practice.
Related:
I can’t tell you the exact recipe, but I can tell you that brutal self-honesty will reveal the answers.
The deck might be stacked against you
It’s true.
Forces outside of your control can and will affect your ability to succeed. You didn’t choose your parents, your upbringing, or your socio-economic starting point. You might be judged on immutable characteristics like your race, gender, and sexual orientation.
Some of the traits that contribute to worldly success and the way people treat you are genetic like IQ, height, and beauty. Some people who are less talented than you might excel faster than you through favoritism or sheer dumb luck.
It is what it is.
I’m all for equality and fairness. But you have to live your life right now.
Do you have the time to wait for the world to become perfectly even and fair before you start your mission? Or is it best to do what you can with what you have right now?
Life deals you cards. It’s almost always a better option to play the cards you’re dealt than to complain about your hand because complaining doesn’t do anything. That energy is better served trying to improve your situation regardless of your starting point.
Sometimes, often, people reach out to me via emails and comment on my content with a laundry list of reasons they can’t succeed when it comes to creating content or building their online business.
Every once in a while I reply to them with something like:
Alright then. Looks like you’re screwed. You should just give up.
When I respond to them this way, they begin to understand their flawed perspective. If you argue for your limitations, you get to keep them. If you’re defeated before you even start, there’s nowhere to go and no move to make.
Instead of finding all the reasons why it won’t work, start focusing on all the reasons it will.
Instead of asking yourself “What if it doesn’t work?” ask yourself “What if it does work?”
Sometimes in poker, you can win a hand just by having confidence and bluffing your way to success even though you have a bad hand. You can do the same thing in life. Even if the odds are against you, you can get ahead if you seem certain it’s going to work out, even though statistically it’s not supposed to.
Related:
You’re alone on your journey
Friends and family might wish you the best, but they won’t be in the trenches doing the work with you.
And I hate to say it but, even if people are rooting for you, they don’t really believe in you all that much.
Why would they? Most people talk a big game and do nothing. It’s normal for others to expect you to behave the same way.
Society isn’t on your side. In fact, our culture is designed to keep you locked into a life you don’t want to live. Not because it’s some hateful machine, but because society needs a large group of people to do what’s necessary to keep the gears turning.
Most of the work you’ll do will be in isolation—sweating it out at the gym, coding for hours straight, creating marketing plans.
No one will be by your side to hold your hand.
As much as I enjoy writing motivational content, I won’t be there with you. I can only give you the encouragement to help you get started. You’ll spend most of this journey alone.
Sure, you’ll have people in your corner—like-minded friends, business partners, employees, fans—but the only one who can truly keep you accountable is you.
Fortunately, you have what it takes to be successful and hold yourself accountable. Own who you are. Take full responsibility. And then reap the rewards.
You’re never going to arrive
Stop waiting for a moment that’s never going to come—when you reach the pinnacle of success, completely content, free of problems, and full of bliss.
Here’s what will actually happen:
You’ll achieve a new milestone and it will feel amazing for a small and fleeting amount of time.
You will quickly get used to your new level of success, status, wealth, or whatever “thing” you thought would make you feel whole.
When you solve one set of problems you will simply be handed a new set of problems. They’ll be more expensive and better problems, but problems nonetheless.
You’ll chase the next milestone thinking that will fill the void. Let’s say you make $10,000 per month and you say to yourself “When I hit $20,000 per month I will be happy.” Then you will hit $20,000 and say to yourself “When I hit $50,000 per month I will be happy.”
You will go through multiple cycles of this “hedonic treadmill” effect until you realize the point of the game. The point of the game is to play the game. You will never arrive and that’s okay.
One of the great insights of psychoanalysis is that you never really want an object, you only want the wanting, which means the solution is to set your sights on an impossible ideal and work hard to reach it. You won’t. That’s not just okay, that’s the point. It’s ok if you fantasize about knowing kung fu if you then try to actually learn kung fu, eventually you will understand you can never really know kung fu, and then you will die. And it will have been worth it.
—The Last Psychiatrist
You only want the wanting.
This is why people still build businesses after they make millions. It’s why pro athletes keep practicing relentlessly after winning multiple championships. It’s why some people seem to have this compulsion to win even though there’s no need to.
In their minds, and mine, the reason why is simple.
There’s nothing better to do.
We are not wired to sit on the beach all day and live an endless vacation. We are here to be useful. We are here to make a contribution and leave our dent in the universe by extracting as much output from our natural talents as possible. We are here to leave it on the field.
You can adopt this mentality right now even if you haven’t accomplished much. When you realize that the process of mastery itself is the point, then you will become successful.
Earl Nightengale has the most crisp and useful explanation of success I’ve ever found. He says that you are successful the minute you start taking progressive steps toward achieving a goal.
That’s all you need to live a successful life: Have a goal in mind, begin working on it, and continue to work on it until it works. Once you reach that goal, replace it with another one.
Wash, rinse, and repeat for a life well-lived.