There is one thing I’ve found to be true in successful people—successful athletes, successful leaders, successful teams, successful organizations, nonprofits, for-profit—it doesn’t matter.
The true story of success in anything you do in your life, anywhere in the world, is this: Success comes down to doing the things we know we should be doing even when we don’t feel like doing them.
Success is Not About Taking The Escalator
In other words, success in anything is not about taking the escalator.
Success is about taking the stairs, about being the kind of person who will do the things that other people won’t do. Do the things that we know we should be doing. But what’s hard is we don’t really live in a take-the-stairs world. You don’t have to go any further than the nearest magazine stand at the checkout counter to see the kind of messaging that we’re constantly barraged with.
People always showing us how to get rich quick, how to make the most amount of money with the least amount of effort.
And it’s not just in our financial lives. It’s in our physical lives, too. There’s always somebody pitching us a magic pill or some secret potion or some hidden formula to lose our gut the easy way.
In the United States, entire industries collapsed because every single time we turned around we had somebody new showing us how to buy it NOW. How to have it NOW. How to enjoy it NOW?
But you don’t have to pay for it until later. And that buying-on-credit mentality works in some ways in life.
Focus on the Long-Term Goals
When it comes to the mentality of success, all it does is create a culture of entitlement, and entitlement is this disgusting disease that destroys our ability to reach our dreams. It’s disgusting because it means the reason we don’t succeed. The reason we don’t reach our potential is not that we aren’t smart enough. It’s not because we aren’t talented enough. It’s not because we didn’t have the right resources. It was because, at some point in our life, we stopped choosing to do the things that were necessary, and fundamental, and critical for success.
One of my favorite ads, from Sky Mall magazine, is for a device that allows you to exercise in four minutes per day. Such a steal of a deal at $14,615!
This is the world we live in. It’s a world of escalators (short cuts).
We’ve interviewed world-class athletes, celebrities, and now we work with a lot of fairly high-profile people at Brand Builders Group helping them build their personal brands, some at the beginning of their journey, some already superstars. We help them launch books, help them build an online following, and help manage their brands. We see firsthand what it takes for them to get to success.
We live in an escalator world, but no matter what you want to do to succeed, we have to take the stairs.
The Path of Discipline Leads to Success
And ultimately success comes down to one simple word. Discipline.
I can take an entire career of everything I have studied about what really creates success and deliver you the truth in one word. And this is it. And it’s not necessarily hard work. You can work hard at the wrong things and that won’t get you very far.
It’s discipline.
The discipline to do the things you know you should be doing even when you don’t feel like doing them.
I was very fortunate to learn about discipline at a young age.
When I was five years old, my mom put me into martial arts. She thought it would be good for me to learn a little discipline. By age 10, I had become the youngest Black Belt in Colorado to ever get beaten up by a girl!
And I used to fight with my mom. I was like, “Mom, this sucks. I hate this. This isn’t fun for me. I don’t enjoy it.”
And my mom used to always say the same thing back to me. She would say, “Well, that’s okay, Rory. Because enjoying it isn’t a requirement of doing it.”
Enjoying it isn’t a requirement of doing it.
What a great lesson to learn as a kid.
And then we become these sophisticated adults and we lose sight of that. All-important truth: enjoying it isn’t a requirement of doing it.
What don’t you feel like doing that’s keeping you from achieving success? Leave me a comment below.
