The Secret to Success
If you feel like you will never reach your goals, you need to read this.
If you have read any of my other articles, you probably know that I’ve been a musician for almost my entire life. I started taking violin lessons when I was 5, went on to get a music degree, and then became a music educator and professional musician.
For the first five years that I took violin lessons, I was bad. Most beginners, especially on stringed instruments, sound horrible for years before they make any kind of noticeable progress. Practicing every day, going to lessons every week, putting time and energy into getting better, and still sounding like a beginner three years later is not a fun experience. It required extraordinary amounts of discipline and patience, especially for a young child.
For years, I practiced for 20 minutes almost every day. I didn’t see any real payoff until I was in middle school. That’s almost ten years of consistency before I saw any tangible result!
The years of hard work finally compounded to the point where I still reap the benefits of the daily practice I put in as a child. I earn a significant amount of income from teaching lessons and playing gigs. I have had so many amazing opportunities all because of my consistency early on, which laid the foundation for my entire musical career.
The daily choice to practice seemed insignificant at the time, but it turned out to yield the biggest payoff in the long run.
Ice cream
During my first year of teaching, I didn’t know how to cope with the stresses of the classroom, so I developed the bad habit of chowing down on ice cream every evening upon returning home from work. It gave me the instant gratification and dopamine hit that I was craving after a long day.
It didn’t seem like a big deal. It was just ice cream, and I needed something to take the edge off. But after six months of eating ice cream every day, I had put on 15 pounds. That small, seemingly insignificant daily decision had a huge impact on my health.
Both of these stories illustrate that the smallest decisions have a huge impact over time, and this can be positive or negative.
The significance of everyday
Anything you do every single day will yield some sort of result. Take brushing your teeth as an example. You do it every day and it seems like the most insignificant task, but what would happen if you stopped brushing your teeth? It would be disgusting and you would have some serious health consequences. Eventually, you would be paying big money for dental bills.
If you decided to write a page every day, it wouldn’t seem like a big decision in the moment, but after a year, you would have a 365-page book. If you decided to write an article every day, you would have 365 articles after a year of writing. Small, daily, choices yield big results.
Take anything you do daily and multiply it by 365. Scrolling through Facebook every morning may seem insignificant, but if you do it for even five minutes a day, that is 30 hours a year that you spent scrolling. That’s an entire day + more of your life!
Patience is key
We live in a world where we experience more instant gratification than ever before. You can order food and it will be at your house in ten minutes. You can turn on the TV and be entertained right now. You can call anyone and talk to them whenever you want. We very rarely have to practice waiting.
Achieving your goals will not happen overnight. Oftentimes, we are waiting for a big win. An article to go viral. A book deal offer. An agent to approach us out of the blue. 99.99% of the time, this isn’t how it works.
Those big wins happen after weeks, months, and years of consistency. We have to show up and do the work as consistently as possible, and trust that our effort will compound over time. Usually, that consistency will pay off in some way, but you must be patient and not expect immediate results.
A great example of this is when you are trying to get in shape. The first few weeks of workouts don’t make you feel good, just sore and tired. You’ll feel like crap and also won’t see any noticeable results. You won’t be losing weight or have any muscle gains for at least six weeks, if not longer.
The hard part is sticking with it for those first six weeks, even when it doesn’t feel good and it doesn’t feel like there will be any sort of reward. Even after you get through the beginning stages of soreness, the results are extremely small as you move forward. You might lose a pound in one month. You might be able to run a minute longer after a few weeks.
The wins are very small. Nobody gets ripped overnight, it takes months and years of consistency.
Final thoughts
What is it that you do every day that impacts you positively or negatively? Like I said before, take your daily habits and multiply them by 365, then you will realize what habits you either need to add or remove from your life.
When the consistency feels fruitless, remember that no one becomes a success overnight. Don’t focus on today’s results, but instead, think of today’s actions multiplied by 365.
Instant gratification can steal your dreams. Instead, practice patience and trust that your daily routines will have a huge impact on your future.
