My 12-year-old just demonstrated the secret to massive success

What children can teach you about achieving your goals

My son has an atypical brain and an atypical hobby.

Like me, he’s a restless, ADHD-type who can be both scattered at times and laser focused when he finds something he’s really interested in.

Also like me, he loves going to the gym.

This isn’t what you would call a normal habit for a 12-year-old, but for some reason he’s always been drawn to it.

He’s a competitive hockey goaltender, and any time we’d go to a travel tournament, all he’d want to do is go to the hotel gym. Like he wanted to go run on the treadmill in between games.

Like me, he needs to be in constant motion or he gets uncomfortable, both mentally and physically.

So you can imagine his excitement when he finally turned 12 this year and was thus eligible for his own membership at our local fitness centre.

A milestone is reached

As I was on the stair climber, he came up to me with the biggest smile on his face. He’d been stretching on the mat behind me beforehand.

“Dad,” he exclaimed with joy on his face. “Look at this!”

I’m not a flexible athlete by nature, and neither is he. As you can imagine, however, flexibility is very important for hockey goaltenders.

He immediately bent over like Gumby (wow, I’m old, sorry to anyone who doesn’t get that reference), and placed his palms flat on the floor like it was nothing. He then went to the mat behind us, effectively did sitting splits, and touched his head to the mat effortlessly.

His joy came from the fact that he had surprised himself. He never thought he was flexible and didn’t know if he could be, yet he followed his process every day without fail and success found him.

When he got his gym membership two months ago, he was about four inches short of even being able to touch his toes.

It’s a microcosm for sure, but it hit me right there and then.

This kid has just demonstrated everything you need to know about reaching your biggest goals:

Massive victories are built on the hundreds — sometimes thousands — of small, daily wins that preceeded them

Have you ever heard the expression: “It took me 10 years to become an overnight success.”

In our culture, we expect everything to fall into place for us and we expect it YESTERDAY.

Yet this is so far from reality.

Think of an Olympic athlete who gains worldwide fame as a gold medal winner in a marquee sport. People see the shiny gold hanging around the athlete’s neck, not the countless 5 a.m., three-hour practices before school every day.

Think of a band like Imagine Dragons, a bunch of nobodies who spent years grinding out shows and writing hit-and-miss songs that never went anywhere before becoming one of the biggest touring acts on the planet.

Yet they went to work every single day. Every session Imagine Dragons played together, they’d get a tiny bit better at their instruments, at their songwriting, at figuring out who they were going to be.

The point is, you don’t wake up one morning to massive victory.

Massive victory is the result of almost unnoticeable daily wins.

My son, the Olympian, and the band also demonstrate that you should …

Focus on process, not end goals

I don’t really set goals anymore, per se. I spent a lot of my 20s and 30s setting goals and never achieving them.

That’s because I simply didn’t do the work. I was focused on the goal and, when I perceived it to be taking too long to come to fruition, I’d quit.

Now if I set a goal, it’s based on process, not results.

I write a lot about sobriety and my own goal of quitting my three bad habits this year: alcohol, caffeine, and social media.

I haven’t had a drink in 69 days, but my goal wasn’t to “quit drinking.”

Quitting drinking was too big.

My “goal” was to follow a daily process of tracking my behaviour, managing withdrawal, and controlling my mental thought processes in a way that would allow me to go 66 days without having an alcoholic beverage (research suggests it takes an average of 66 days to create or eliminate a habit).

Sixty-six days have come and gone, yet my process is still in place and, as a result, I continue to make massive gains in my health, mood and income since quitting.

Did Imagine Dragons have a goal of being one of the top touring bands in the world? I can’t say for sure, but I imagine the initial goal was: “make a living as musicians.”

Yet it wasn’t the goal that got them there, it was the process of going out every day and getting a fraction of a percent better until one song became a hit and kicked off their exponential growth curve.

(Look, my kids really like Imagine Dragons and I recently heard a radio show called ‘The History of New Music’ detailing their background so I thought it was an apt example lol.)

My son wasn’t thinking about reaching a goal either.

He knew vaguely that he wanted to be a better goaltender and thus needed to be more flexible, but at no point did he say, “by October 23, I want to be able to do sitting splits and touch my head to the mat like a dang circus performer.”

That he has achieved that level of flexibility after only a couple of months of coming to the gym with me was the result of his almost daily process, not his goal.

(Side note, as I was writing this, he came down and was effortlessly juggling like a busker with one hand and one eye covered to improve his hand-eye coordination for goaltending — another multi-year-plus, process-based activity that has given him a unique and entertaining skill).

In summary

The key to achieving any goal in your life is so painfully simple: put a process in place and focus solely on picking up small victories every day.

I call it painful because, despite it being so simple, almost nobody does it.

People complain about how their lives aren’t working out the way they wanted or about who or what situation screwed them.

Then, instead of looking for little wins every night, they watch Netflix for 5 hours and then gripe about going to work in the morning.

I’m not being judgmental. I’ve been there. I knew quitting alcohol was the key to everything for me, yet I chose for many years not to do it.

I think that’s why my son coming up to me with that look on his face resonated so much.

I feel like I’ve finally figured it out at age 41. It makes me happy to see him doing the same at 12.

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