How to Achieve Success At Anything
Often times we find ourselves thinking about doing something to change our current lifestyle, but still remain unable to actually do it. This happens repeatedly for many such of our “so-called” goals that we begin to think that maybe we are just not capable of doing those difficult tasks anymore. And, that is why, we keep delaying them in order to push the responsibility to out future self.
In reality, I can tell you with absolute certainty that you are indeed able to do those tasks that you currently deem to be equivalent to climbing a steep mountain. The way you can achieve them is divided into two parts, the first part has more to do with your ‘thinking’, while the latter part is all about ‘action’.
- Thinking about your Success
- Taking Action for your Success
Thinking About Your Success
This is the first step you take in reaching your goal and working on this ensures that you do not give up midway even if you stumble many times along the way. You can also consider the output of this step to be the ‘motivation’ for you to keep going until you reach the end.
The way you find this motivation for any of your goal is to simply thin about the answers to the following four questions. You have to think about the answers as honestly as you can, in a way that is true to yourself and not in a way that you want it to be perceived as the truth. Also, the answers you find are different for everyone else even if they have the same goal so only you should know them. There is no need for you to tell others about them as they should only see the success you achieve at the end. Quite like how you only see the prepared dish at the end in the restaurant and not the complicated process which the chef went through to achieve that end result.
What Do You Want To Achieve?
Any part of your life that you want to improve upon, you should first ask yourself which exact thing it is that needs to be worked upon. Consider, for example, if you want to get in a better physical shape, then you need to improve your body. The way to do that is by exercise. So, now you know that you want to achieve your goal by incorporating exercise into your daily life.
Why Do You Want To Achieve It?
This is the answer which first drives you to take control of your life and work to change a certain aspect of it. While answering this question, you need to be honest to yourself and see whichever reason ignites the fire within you. It doesn’t matter if the reason appears to be selfish to you, because even if you don’t like the original reason, you only need to think of it as a way to trick yourself into doing the things which are currently not possible. No matter if it is the most selfish reason or the most noblest of the reasons, only you need to know about it. No one else will care about your reasons because, after all, the final end product is to improve yourself to begin with and only that should be seen by others.
Taking our example from before, you may want to exercise to stay healthy or you may just want to impress other people. It might even be a combination of a lot of things and all of those are good as long as they are true for you.
How Can You Achieve It?
The answer to this question should allow you to get a clear grasp on what you are going to change in your life top achieve the result you want in the future. This answer is closely linked to the second part of you actually taking action to achieve something as having a clear understanding of what you need to do will not only allow you to start taking action immediately, but it will also allow you to define clear goals and milestones for yourself to keep track of your progress.
Considering the same example, you need to exercise to improve your physical shape. To incorporate exercise in your life, you might need to got o the gym regularly and maybe change your diet accordingly. All of these might seem like daunting things at first, but we only still need to get a broad idea of our answer here. As you continue reading to the next step, you will see that taking action will not be that difficult for you at all. And once you do start, you can fine tune your milestones accordingly.
What Is Stopping You From Achieving It?
This is a question you need to answer for yourself based on the things that stop you from bringing about the change that you want to bring about in your life.
Maybe it will include some bad habits or maybe some responsibilities that you cannot shake off. The answer you need to think here is not how to remove these obstacles, but how to make your new action co-exist with the already existing life. Your goal should not be to remove the bad things and add new things at the same time as it might prove to be to difficult a task at the beginning. Instead focus on adding the new and better things to your life and slowly increase the time you can allocate to them from your daily routine.
Taking Action For Your Success
Compared to the previous step where you thought about different things in order to muster up the courage to start and keep going on a difficult path, this step is actually much more simpler as it only involves you to start taking action. Just because it is simpler, does not mean it will be easier as well. It is simple as you only have to take action to achieve your goal, however, doing so is not an easy thing on its own. You can think of this part as being the ‘discipline’ you need in order to overcome any obstacle in your path to improve yourself.
Incremental Action
The way you can make this step about taking action easier is by considering the approach to work steadily in a progressive manner. For doing that, you need to divide whatever action you have in mind for achieving your goal into smaller parts. You should keep repeating this process of division until you end up with tasks that appear to be relatively doable. Then, you only need to incorporate these tasks into your life and stick to them no matter what.
An important thing to note about this step is that you should focus on just starting with any action no matter how small it is, rather than spending time trying to convince yourself to begin with incorporating a bigger action in your life. The reason for that is because any action you incorporate should be kept as part of your lifestyle in a stable manner. It should be challenging enough so that it improves yourself no matter how small in scale that might be. And, it should be small enough so you do not have to spend too much effort in only convincing yourself to do this task daily. If you find it difficult, then try to divide it further and further into smaller parts. As you grow accustomed to the smallest part, try adding another small task to your routine and keep repeating the process.
Consider this as a compound interest for your life. Any small action will have some kind of profit for you and then you need to keep that original task and its profit in your life as well as add another small task to it. So, now your daily task has relatively increased in size, but your profit has increased even more from where you started. The key thing is to start and keep going steadily while making gradual progress without regressing.
Conclusion
All in all, you should first try to find the answers to these questions to not only find out what you want to change, but how you can change it to improve your life. Then you should also consider the blockers you might face today if you began to add that particular action in your life and then think of ways to overcome them.
While taking the actions to reach your goal, the important thing is to start immediately and start with lowest possible action step. If you still need more time to convince yourself in doing a task then the time it actually takes for you to complete that task, then as Jordan Peterson says, you need to aim even lower. Also, remember to think about the incremental aspect which you incorporate any action in your life. Even if it is small now, you need to continuously keep adding new tasks for yourself to keep growing steadily without ever regressing.
As you go along this method, you cannot doubt your initial answers to your questions just because things get difficult. Remember to always make such decisions when you are in a completely peaceful state of mind. What you might actually want to change is the scale of your actions or your strategy to deal with the obstacles blocking your way. Keep going and you will eventually reach that insurmountable mountain top where you never thought it was possible before.
