Mindset | Personal Growth

Success Is No Mystery, It’s Simply the Result of Consistency

But “simple” doesn’t mean easy.

What is “success”? Is it the attainment of wealth? Is it the achievement of personal goals? Or is it all about money, power, and fame?

Such a highly subjective question, isn’t it?

When I was 19, I made my first 100 million IDR — around $6900 — from an online business that I’ve been running for about 2 years.

I wasn’t born into a wealthy family, so that amount of cash was really something for us, especially for me who worked hard for over a year to achieve it.

After all the sleepless nights, sweat blood of dedication, and constant struggles of dividing my time for business, college (yes, I was still a college student at that time), and my social life in general, I thought to myself: I made it!

Then, I dedicated most of my money to help my parents make the pilgrimage to Mecca.

At that point in my life, I thought I was already “successful”, and of course; even my parents thought so. I wasn’t wrong, because my definition of success back then was “to bring my parents to go on Hajj with my own earned money”.

But now? I’ve found another definition of success. I have made more goals, along with bigger targets and visions.

How do we define success?

As students, we may define success as getting good grades in school or getting top ranks in class.

Then, when we enter “the real world” and have a job, we may think of success as the ability to do well at work or earn a high salary.

If we decide to become entrepreneurs, the definition of success might be having a marketable product or running a profitable business. Or, we may make our definition of success more particular, for instance; my business is successful if my company earns money while I’m on vacation.

What all of this really says is that success is subjective. It can mean different things to different people at different times in life.

To some — or most — people, success means wealth. But to others, it’s recognition, good health, good family, happiness, satisfaction, and peace of mind.

For me, the definition that I think summarizes “success” well is how Earl Nightingale put it:

Success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal.

Let’s look at these definitions carefully.

• “Progressive” means that success is a journey, not a destination. We never arrive. After we reach one goal, we go on to the next and the next and the next.
• “Realization” means it is an experience. Outside forces can’t make us feel successful. We have to feel it within ourselves. Success is internal, not external.
• “Worthy” refers to our value system. Which way are we heading? Positive or negative? Worthiness determines the quality of our journey. It gives meaning and fulfillment. Success without fulfillment is empty.
• And the last: “Goal”. If we want to be successful, we need to make goals. Because if we don’t, how could we know that we’ve succeeded? Goals are important because they give us a sense of direction.

Setting goals and working to achieving them helps us define what we truly want in life, helps us prioritize things, and gives us a roadmap to follow our journey toward success.

Success is no mystery

A lot of research has gone into the subject of success and failure. But apart from all of our subjective definitions of success, I think we all can learn to be “successful” from our lessons in history.

When we study the life histories of successful people, we find that they have certain common qualities — no matter which period of history they lived in.

For example, according to some more recent research, there are certain traits that tend to be consistently tied to success. Researchers have identified six key traits that can play a role in people’s “success”, specifically at work.

The 6 traits of successful people are:

• Conscientiousness
• Tolerance of ambiguity (feeling comfortable with uncertainty)
• The capability of adjustments (being well-adjusted)
• Courage
• Curiosity
• Competitiveness

How many did you tick? I believe that if you have reached a certain level of success in your life, you can identify some (or even all) of these characteristics in yourself.

However, there are optimal levels of these traits. Too little of them can hinder success; and so can too much of them.

For instance, competitiveness is a good trait to be competent. This trait helps us climbing the ladder or getting ahead in life. But being too competitive can cause us to feel stressed out all the time — resulting in work/life imbalance.

Success is about consistency

At the age of 19, most people — who weren’t that close with me — thought that I had almost everything I wanted in life — for someone at that age.

Not just the money from my business, I also had a supportive family, amazing close friends, and a loving partner.

Yes, they weren’t wrong. But these people only saw the surface.

What they didn’t see, I had to sacrifice a lot of time, sleep, vacation, social life, and even my sanity. If they could see just a little beneath the surface, they would understand how challenging and overwhelming life was for me, to say the least.

But one thing for sure, if they wanted to give a damn, what I did that time was — I kept going. I carried on. I persevered. I constantly adhered to the same principles; being consistent.

The power of consistency is profound and underrated.

Consistency means focusing on the goals at hand while maintaining a long-term vision. It’s about repeating the same actions (habits and rituals) over and over; get feedback on these actions and adapt it to help us stay on track as we work towards our goals.

Consistency needs patience and perseverance

It’s easy to just start something — trust me, even until this second, I have a lot of ongoing projects that I don’t know if I will ever finish — but how many of us would be willing to do it long enough to get the results we want?

A month? 2 months? Maybe a year? Are you willing to do it for five years? Twenty years? Will you stay on the rocky road for long enough to reach the beautiful path?

“Success leaves clues. Go figure out what someone who was successful did, and model it. Improve it, but learn their steps. They have knowledge.” — Tony Robbins

As Tony Robbins said in the quote above; success leaves clues. If you want to succeed, the simplest thing you can do is to inspect these clues closely and learn from successful people. Success is simply the result of consistency that goes hand in hand with patience and perseverance.

When I say the word “simply”, it doesn’t mean easy. But simple is about understanding.

Life is not complicated. We are complicated. However, when we stop doing the wrong things and start doing the right things, we will understand life better — and strangely enough, we’ll find that life becomes simple.

Takeaway

Success is highly subjective. There is no single measure of success, and of course, there is no single answer for how to be successful in life.

But no matter what’s your definition of “success”, you can achieve it by applying some basic principles. You can look at the habits of successful people and learn their tactics and strategies to apply in your everyday life.

And then, you need to take the patience to get there. You need to form habits of successful people until it becomes second nature. Then, be consistent enough to build momentum.

That’s what I did to help me “succeed” when I was 19 — and that’s what I will keep doing to help me achieve “more success” in life.

Finally, no matter what kind of success we want in life, perhaps we can also define it simply as how Arnold H. Glasow put it:

“Success is simple. It is doing what is right, the right way, at the right time.” — Arnold H. Glasow