Jun 5, 2021
Three Ingredients of Success
Discipline, quality, and…
Would Steph Curry have amassed the same basketball accolades by snoozing, performing poorly, and quitting early?
Success can come in many shapes and forms, from becoming an accomplished lawyer to becoming the NBA MVP. However, there are three recurring ingredients that seem to lead to any success, which are discipline, quality, and time.
Discipline, Quality, and Time
Discipline is about showing up
Whatever your craft is, it is crucial that you show up. If you are building an affiliate marketing website, you need to be on your computer writing material or at least outsourcing it. If you started a window cleaning company, you need to be in the office running it.
If you are struggling to show up, see if someone else can hold you accountable. You may ask your affiliate marketing partner to pick you up at 8 AM to go to a co-working space together. If waking up is tough, it’s bound to be easier to avoid disappointing your partner.
Another thing you can do is simply consume more motivational material. It doesn’t have to be corny speeches with epic orchestral music. It can be a brief showcase about a successful person or a longer interview about how a millionaire became a millionaire. You quickly realize how showing up is key.
Quality is how well you show up
Great, you showed up! Showing up is only part of the game, though. You now have to make sure your performance is on point.
- Educate yourself about your craft to know what to do.
- Optimize your conditions to work at your peak performance.
- Constantly evaluate your results or lack thereof to adjust yourself.
You may go into a field, thinking it’s intuitive, but it’s the nuance that separates the successful from the mediocre. Graphic design is not only about beautiful illustrations. It’s when aspects like psychology and marketing are taken into consideration that effective graphic design can be achieved.
About optimizing conditions, it’s about sleeping well the previous evening, eliminating distractions, and supplementing with things caffeine or even nonmaterial things like music. Do you work better when the temperature is colder? Make sure your workspace brings out your elite qualities.
Evaluating your results is vital to know whether or not you’ve been working in vain. It may be a hard pill to swallow, but your perception of quality and vision do not matter if your end goal is not being met. If your store is not rapidly selling products other stores sell well, it’s time to re-approach your workflow.
If you can’t ensure your own quality, hire quality! There are many ways to fund your business initially, from loans to investors, and quality personnel can elevate your business. Realize that you need to make quality choices yourself to pick the right people, but you can always use a reputable HR team.
Time and patience are needed
If a Mark Cuban pill is invented and you take it, gaining his work ethic would still not be enough to become an overnight success. You need to bring discipline and quality to the table over a long span of time to truly achieve greatness.
Sure, overnight successes happen, but they are not the norm. Even if you became an overnight success, it would be tough to excel in another field if you only rely on luck.
Congrats, you became an overnight rap sensation, but what about your dream to design clothes?
You need to show up as often as possible to design those clothes during work sessions brimming with quality. As time goes by, the seeds you’ve planted can grow into trees. Besides, people need time to realize they need new clothes and then decide which ones to buy…
It would be hard to achieve success with one of the three ingredients missing.
- You may be disciplined for the next decade, but if your work is not quality, you will not maximize the rewards, especially if you’re competing in an oversaturated niche.
- You may bring quality to the table for 20 years, but if you do it sporadically, your building blocks don’t add up in time. Blake Griffin’s dunk record wouldn’t be as impressive if he averages one dunk a season.
- Being disciplined and providing quality work for three months will unlikely give you the same results as those who put three years to three decades of sheer passion.
Sit down with yourself and see which ingredient you may be missing. Add it to your life, and constantly question whether or not all your ingredients are intact. Even if they’re already there, consciously make sure you maintain them.
