What one person can do, another person can do. What one person will do, another person may not. One of the variables to unlocking success is your willingness to keep doing the right thing long enough that you achieve the result you want.
Don’t Give Up Too Soon
One of the reasons you may struggle to produce a specific result is that you give up too soon, abandoning the strategy, the tactics, or the approach that others have proven effective. You start doing the work with a sense of hope and excitement, but because it doesn’t feel like you are making any progress, you decide it isn’t working and give up too soon.
The problem with progress is that you are moving towards your goal even when it doesn’t feel like it to you. It’s like a parent who doesn’t recognize how much their child has grown until someone who hasn’t seen them in a year makes not of their transformation.
Some outcomes take time. You can do everything right with no evidence of progress, even though you are closer to the result than you imagine. You have to persist through the time where you are doing the right thing without a result.
At some point, you will gain traction, and you’ll recognize your forward movement. Respect the process, and don’t give up too soon.
Be Consistent
If you do something consistently, you tend to produce results, and those results are also consistent. When you do something sporadically, you may not produce sporadic results. You are just as likely to produce no effect at all, especially in any endeavor that requires disciplined action over time, like prospecting, coaching, losing weight, or achieving wealth.
A cheat day is not the same as days when you don’t do your work, whatever that means to you. Putting forth the effort to do something one day, only to not do the next, will cost you the result you want, which is why disciplines are the crucial ingredient to goal-attainment.
Doing the right thing consistently over time will provide you with greater certainty that you achieve your goal, as well as delivering the result to you faster. If you are going to be anything, be consistent.
Give Yourself Time to Become Competent
What you want may require you gain a new, necessary competency. It may take you time to develop that competency, especially if you have never done anything like it before. It is possible to take the right action but execute so poorly that you fail to produce the result, an experience that is not unfamiliar to you. Your first attempt at anything new is sure to be embarrassingly bad because you lack the experience.
It’s helpful to remember how you became adept at the things you are good at now. There are no experts that weren’t first beginners. Nor are there professionals who weren’t amateurs first. The reason that doing the right thing worked for those who gained the competency is that they gave themselves the time to develop.
Don’t Look for an Easier Way
When what you want to work isn’t working, looking for another way—and easier way—can be an attractive idea. There are always con-artists and charlatans who will sell you a dream, though you deliver their dream to them when you hand over your money. Any result worth having is going to require your time and your effort. Any promise of results that suggests you can have what you want without time and effort is a lie.
Unlocking success in some area of your life is going to require that you do the work. The easy way is the hard way, and the hard way is the easy way. As seductive as the idea of an “easier” way might sound, it only moves you further away from your goal or the result you seek.
Don’t Worry So Much About Time
It doesn’t matter how much time it takes as much as it matters that you persist. You can not cheat success out of its payment. Wanting the result to come faster doesn’t accelerate the outcome any more than seeking an easier way. The time is going to pass whether you are doing the work or not, so there is no reason to give up, to do the work sporadically, to drop out before you are competent, or to look for a hack.
Keep doing the right thing until it takes hold, and you achieve your goal.
