4 Essential Ideas All Successful People Used

No fancy tricks, only harsh truths

When it comes to advising on pursuing your goals, you have probably heard it all. A zillion ideas are floating around, each enamored with a magic promise to set you on a path to glory.

And yet, the number of satisfied achievers are underwhelming.

Could it be a problem of plenty? When you have a thousand offers of wisdom, picking and choosing the one that fits your life could be difficult.

So, here am stripping off all that unnecessary fat, presenting to you the absolute bare minimum, the 4 basic concepts you need to familiarise yourself with, to chase down any target in your life.

They are not easy, and they are not sugar talk. But they are what every prosperous soul on this planet has gone through.

#1 Activation energy

Say hi to the concept of Activation energy from your chemistry textbook. As you have learned, Activation energy is the energy required to start or activate a chemical reaction.

And guess what, they are higher than the amount of energy required to maintain the reaction, once it started.

Let’s go back to the example we have all learned about activation energy: The matchbox. If you gently rub the stick against the box, the bar won’t light up.

Because you have to generate sufficient heat energy through friction to initiate a reaction, you will have to rub the stick against the box with some force. And now you have fire!

What does this boring chemistry tell you about your life?

If you didn’t get it so far, it tells you a simple and straightforward fact: that the beginning phase of any endeavour is the most challenging part.

Be it about writing a book or starting your new workout regime the initial few moments are the toughest. It is when you need to input more energy and work to overcome the threshold of activation energy.

Once you garner enough activation energy and start the process, maintaining it is a lot easier.

To exemplify this further, think of inertia, Newton’s first law of motion: everybody has a tendency to maintain its state of motion or rest unless an external force compels it.

When you have lulled yourself to the comfort of inactivity, it is effortless to continue staying unproductive. Your conscious effort is the external force that should pull you out of that passive phase.

Once you start doing the work, it is easier to maintain that flow. As long as an external force doesn’t come in the guise of a distraction, or tiredness, you can go all smooth.

How to put this knowledge into practice?

“Starting is the hardest part, once you get that out of the way, you will find the rest of the journey much easier”_ Simon Sinek

Now that you understand that starting is the most challenging phase, you have to kickstart your efforts, whatever it be.

If you spend time thinking and weighing your action’s pros and cons, the chances are good that you would be stalled. Because your brain can conjure 100 reasons why getting up off your bed to rip your muscles apart with a barbell is a bad idea.

After all, the brain is a machine that is designed to protect us from unpleasant circumstances. The more you think, the less you are likely to convert your thoughts to action; especially if your activity involves leaving the harbors of comfort.

Motivational speaker Mel Robbins has written an entire book to beat this withholding nature of the brain. It’s called the 5 Seconds Rule, and it explains in different ways how to win this habit.

She suggests counting from 5 to 1, to arrest any distracting, or negative thoughts with this counting, and then propel ourselves into action without a second thought. 5,4,3,2,1 and there you go.

Because the more you think, the more you stagnate. Galvanize yourself into action as early as possible. Do it before unhelpful thoughts can stall you.

#2 Progress Principle

Assuming that you have mustered enough activation energy to start working towards your goal, here is the next big thing: how to keep yourself motivated?

I mentioned that maintaining the workflow is more manageable than starting something, but it still is a daunting task.

Too many factors, operating within and outside of your mind, falter your commitment to finishing your goal. They come in the form of a social media notification or a nagging thought about something that happened yesterday.

How do you wade through all those traps and stay on course? Once again, there is no easy answer here. I could tell you to listen to motivational videos or read inspirational quotes, but their effect tends to ward off with time.

The sustainable source of motivation is nothing but the tiny progress you make in your endeavour itself. I know that sounds a bit like saying “the solution to magic is real magic”.

Because, progress is what you are seeking, and calling progress itself as the resource of motivation is a tad hard to digest.

But if it were easy, you would have frequently bumped into Steve Jobs and Elon Musks in every nook and corner of your street.

Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer popularised the concept of the Progress Principle in their book that goes by the same name.

While doing the research for their book, they noted that many managers who took part in the study rated progress as the least important factor for achieving success in the workplace.

And yet, for the authors, who went through thousands of entries, it was apparent that progress was the common denomination in success, that nobody was talking about.

How to put this knowledge into practice?

5 Small Wins a day leads to 1850 wins in 12 months. Consistency breeds mastery- Robin Sharma.

Here is the good thing about this principle: It doesn’t have to be based on epic progress. Tiny wins, a little improvement can tremendously boost your mood and keep you afloat.

So, instead of focussing on the relatively bigger goals, redirect your attention towards achieving micro success. Maybe think about making progress of 1 percent in a day, and by the end of the month, you would have raced ahead by 30 percent!

Still puzzled where to start? Let me give you a few pointers. Here are three things you can do to raise your overall quality of work instantly. They all count as your one percent progress.

1. Declutter your table. Get rid of all the unnecessary items sitting on it, stealing your attention. Perhaps this act would alone give you half an hour extra mile on the job.
2. Keep yourself hydrated while working, especially if you are sitting near a fan. The habit will keep you energized and improve your focus.
3. Make a journaling habit: list your goals at the beginning of a day and enumerate your achieved targets at the end of the day. If you have more ticked boxes at the end, it will give you an instant shot of dopamine.

As you can see, these are general advice and not work-specific. Only you can figure out what is the micro progress you need to make in your work.

Perhaps it involves starting that first page of your book, or finally taking time to finish that challenging coding. It could mean running through 5 percent of the piled up files in your desk or making some tough phone calls.

Smaller progress is easy to achieve, and they stack together to form enormous success. Better still, they motivate you to do more.

#3 Procrastination

Once you gain the momentum of activation energy and race ahead through tiny progress, you are well on course. It’s about time we talked about the pitfalls to avoid. Hence, enter procrastination.

Often christened as the nemesis of productivity, procrastination has some surprising benefits though.

For instance, when you are working on a creative task, procrastinating can cause your mind to bring forth better ideas. Even when you are not consciously working on it, your subconscious mind is actively finding useful ideas to help you in your effort.

So, eventually, when you set down to work, you are armed with many more creative thoughts, thanks to the time you spend not doing anything!

Does that mean procrastination is a mode that you should befriend? Hardly so. Good procrastination, called ‘Active Procrastination’ is when you postpone a task for some other job, which might be more valuable.

‘Passive Procrastination’, the bad one, is doing nothing and watching life slip through your fingers. That clearly is an undesirable outcome. It leads to poor academic or workplace performances and in the worst case can cause mental issues.

Now there are n number of reasons people put off important tasks, but I like the explanation that Mel Robbins has to offer.

Mel says that procrastination is a way of avoiding stress. When you do a pleasurable activity instead of coping with stress, you are instantly rewarded by a shot of dopamine.

Getting to the gym, however rewarding the activity is, still involves a tremendous amount of stress. So does starting that new project. Your brain, as protective as a mother to a newborn, wants you to avoid this stress.

Just lay back on the couch, flip through channels on TV, and it's mission done for your brain.

You have successfully evaded a tense activity. Also, you have failed the progress principle.

How to put this knowledge into practice?

Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration. The rest of us just get up and go to work- Stephen King

Over time, I have tried many solutions to beat procrastination. The popular ones include setting up an external reward for an action done in the right direction; so that we are encouraged to do the right thing.

However, it stopped working after some time.

Looking back, I realize why it failed. Because it is challenging to set up continuous rewards that can match up to dopamine’s neurobiological pleasure, at some point, the rewards we manufacture are bound to lose their shine.

Imagine giving yourself candy for every tough task you accomplish. In a matter of a few days, you would feel like a chimpanzee in a laboratory!

Since I like Mel Robbins’ explanation of stress, I also found her solution to stress as the most effective. And she has this single magic bullet to solve several problems: counting from 5 to 1 and propelling yourself into action.

The reason why it works is that it leaves no space for your brain to pour out the familiar defense mechanisms. Instead of letting the familiar feelings(to procrastinate) take over and trying to replace them with other feelings, Mel asks you to replace feelings with action.

5,4,3,2,1 and boom… off you go. No second thoughts, you are already into it.

“You are more than capable of doing the work to change anything for the better, despite how you feel. Feelings are merely suggestions, ones you can ignore. To change, you must do the same. You must ignore how you feel, and just do it anyway — Mel Robbins

Those are powerful words and advice that works.

Habit loop

We are all driven by several habits. And am not necessarily talking about the significant practices; like smoking or reading. Let’s look at the smaller ones that often slip under the radar.

You walk into a dark room, and your immediate instinct is to search for the switch that puts on a light. Who taught you that? Or when you wake up, the first thing you do is to search for your toothbrush. How are these habits cultivated?

It is essential to understand this because building on your activation energy and sailing on tiny progress are habits that need to be cultivated. If the roots of habits are not deep enough, you will wander off course.

James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, has a lucid and insightful explanation about habit formation.

He says that a habit is formed through 4 different stages: The Cue, craving, response and reward.

A cue is the piece of information that brings with it, a possibility of a reward. It is what triggers the behavior. For instance, your phone makes a notification alert while you are on a tough assignment. It’s a cue. It comes loaded with promises.

Your mind is now led to a craving, the urge to know the content of that message. Also, it is a temporary escape from the stumbling block you suffered in your assignment. Multiple reasons to check the phone, generating enough craving.

The craving is sufficient enough to galvanize you into action. You check your phone, that’s your response to craving.

The act of reading the message has rewarded you in multiple ways: you could know the content of the text and provide you with temporary relief of staying aloof from your unpleasant work.

The cue-craving-response-reward loop is now completed.

These four steps form a neurobiological loop, which becomes the basis of a new habit formation. Subconsciously you have learned to associate the act of checking your phone with a reward of relief that satisfied your craving.

A new habit is formed. Next time your phone chimes, you are on autopilot mode, checking it sans a second thought.

This is what happens to you daily. This is what you have been doing for long, and it accounts for a plethora of habits you now show.

How to put this knowledge into practice?

How can we use this knowledge to build positive habits?

Let’s say you want to spend 2 hours in the gymnasium or spend 4 hours writing daily.

The key is to start on a note that’s easy to follow. If you began working out 2 hours the first day itself, the chances are good that you won’t get too far.

Make it so easy you can’t say no— Leo Babauta

Start making baby steps. Make those steps ridiculously simple that you would feel it’s too easy! Gradually work your way up; it’s the same logic you followed in the Progress Principle.

Think of 1 percent improvement with each passing day and habits would be irrevocably placed.

If you have already read about the cue-craving-response-reward loop, logic would tell you to eliminate any distracting cues from your workspace.

Do not hold your attempts to stratospheric levels of perfection. You are bound to make mistakes, there will be those off days, and it happens to even the best of minds.

But what separates an achiever from a loser is that the former waste no time thinking about the time they lost, and they quickly recuperate.

The Essence of 4 Steps

Try googling what you need to know for achieving success, and the search engine would throw at you a million results.

There is no dearth of ideas, but they are not barbers chairs that fit all buttocks. Many of the advice are often tailor-made for specific situations.

But the above four: activation energy, progress principle, procrastination, and habit loops apply to any endeavor you can think of. They are perhaps the most basic, harsh truths that every aspiring person needs to understand.

But the grandest of intentions are worse than the smallest of efforts. So all this knowledge will not do the work for you.

Get out there and do it now!