It doesn’t matter whether we are talking about succeeding in life in general or achieving success in a specific goal. It all works exactly the same way, whether we decide to become an excellent professional, start a company or lose weight.
Success is far from easy, because obviously if it were easy everyone would achieve it. But it isn’t a secret reserved for a privileged few either. Everyone knows the steps to get there, but not everyone is willing to make the sacrifice.
That’s right: success starts with pain and sacrifice. And athletes know a lot about that. Although every step has its own degree of difficulty and sacrifice, there is one in particular that most successful people agree knocks out more people than any other.
(Read: 4 unconventional steps highly successful people take in life)
First of all, to succeed you have to do what you haven’t done so far, so there is a degree of difficulty in breaking certain habits and taking on new routines until they become part of you.
In other words, if you have set out to lose weight and get fit, your sedentary life has to end. You have to let in the new habit of exercising every day, add foods you didn’t eat before, and drop some foods that have been with you for many years.
The same happens when you set out to get ahead in your career or in business: you have to take on habits such as learning, reading and widening your circle of contacts, and even go to different kinds of events.
See also: Taking apart a scientific study on personal and professional success
There is no success for someone who isn’t willing to make an effort.
When Muhammad Ali was asked how many sit-ups he did a day to get abs like his, he answered that he didn’t know exactly, because he only started counting from the sit-ups that hurt, since those were the ones that made him the champion. Pain and sacrifice to become a champion.
(Read: The 32 rules for becoming a successful entrepreneur)
But sacrifice pays off when there is a reward.
And here we come to the key point where motivation fails. As we have said before, success doesn’t come in a straight line, always going up. It is easy to make sacrifices and work harder when we are getting a reward, but the truth is that whatever we do, we will go through a stage of pain and effort with no reward. And that is precisely the hardest stage of success: the stage that is most demotivating, and the stage where most people give up.
Once we have built certain routines into our lives, we are giving it our all, doing our best and following the plan we set ourselves, and we don’t see immediate results, or we even see ourselves going backwards. That is when discouragement takes over, and only the mentally strongest make it through this stage.
For example, if someone decides to lose weight, they will want to see results as soon as possible. If they have 40 kilograms to lose, even after losing 5 kg they won’t see any change when they look in the mirror. They will probably have ups and downs where their weight goes back up despite the sacrifice, and that part would be crushing.
See also: The 3 goals you should have in life, and there are no others
That is when we tend to forget that discipline has to go hand in hand with patience, persistence and consistency, and to trust that if we do the right thing again and again every day of the week, regardless of the short-term ups and downs, the results will eventually come.
And speaking of ups and downs, there is another stage that is even more demotivating: dealing with failure.
If it is hard to keep making an effort without immediate results, running into a failure can be crushing for most people. The truth is that there is nothing beautiful about failing, but it is also true that a failure can be an excellent source of learning so you don’t make the same mistakes again.
In the end, the secret of success could be defined as “getting used to living in hell for a while in order to reach paradise” (I saw this line in some film). Even if it sounds like a self-help lesson again, the truth is that success is only within reach of people who never give up, despite every single obstacle that comes their way.
As the saying goes, you haven’t failed until you stop trying; so you don’t fail until, at some point, you stop pursuing success. The moment you give up, you can say you failed.
Further reading
- How to build up your resilience to failure
- The key to success with the Seinfeld strategy
- 25 habits of successful people
Featured image: Jess Tan, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
