Do what others won’t do

Jim Rohn says, “Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do.  Don’t wish it were easier; wish you were better.”

I like this quote.  It speaks the fact that success is about what we do, not just what we want.  It isn’t about our dreams; it is about our action towards our dreams that count.

But most people avoid going after major goals and instead take the path of least resistance.  They go through the motions and make excuses why they can’t do more.

If you want to be successful and chase your goals, you have to learn to take action.  You have to learn to get curious about your dreams to learn what it will take so you know what direction to travel.

But successful people also realize that they have to keep going.  They can’t quit.  This means that if they face adversity, they have to persist.  They have to know how to keep going when they don’t feel like it or when others tell them they should stop.

This is one of the reasons why I love the systems and habits approach to improvement so much.  It quickly gets the focus on taking consistent action towards our dreams and goals.

It starts by taking very small steps.  But the key is that we take those steps consistently so they start to become entrenched in our lives.  We tweak the routines and form positive habits that start to build a foundation.

This gives us the ability to keep going long after others quit.  The reason is simple.  We are taking advantage of our natural tendency to follow patterned behavior, instead of looking everything as a one-time event. 

As we take the same steps over and over they start to become so automatic that we barely have to think about them in order to keep doing them.  We already do this throughout our lives.  How many times do you have to set reminders to eat breakfast or go to the bathroom?  Those things become so natural and automatic that we don’t put a lot of thought into keeping those going.

So we take that same principle and find other areas of our lives that we can structure to create better systems for us to follow.  These get more powerful over time as we do them.  So we keep improving more and more and more over time.

This allows us to overcome the two most common pitfalls to being successful.  It allows us to get started and it allows us to keep going.   

If we can just focus on getting started and keeping going until it becomes automatic then we can start to add more and more until we are suddenly doing incredible things effortlessly. 

If you find that you aren’t where you want to be in life and want to be more successful, then learn how to follow inspiration and stick with your goals even when it’s difficult to do so.  The systems and habits approach to improvement can be a great way to help you do both of these.