The Unspoken Rule of Success
Hint: You’re not going to like the answer...
It’s hard work. That’s it. That’s the answer. You can stop reading this article. Study anyone who has achieved success their field — you’ll see a pattern, they all worked extremely hard. The true path to success is hard work, crazy hard work. There’s no gimmicks or get-rich-quick schemes; if you want success in any field you have to work hard. If you want to get ahead of someone else then you have to work harder than them. In diluted terms, if someone works 40 hours a week at someone you work 80 hours at then you will get twice as much done — as Elon Musk commented. In this article I’m going to discuss a few things I’m working and have worked on in my path to success; in the effort to increase the likelihood of achieving that goal and improve my ability to work hard.
Commitment
If you’re aspiring for greatness then you’ve got to commit yourself to that goal. You need to have focus when reaching for that goal. To a certain degree, tunnel vision is recommended — the ability to concentrate solely on your end target is very helpful. Equally, you need to have focus on your commitment — this means that you must choose a specific outcome for your goal that you intend to focus on. A specific field you intend to work in. It’s not enough to say you want to be a successful entrepreneur for example — it’s too broad, easy to miss. The narrower the better (for the most part) — it gives you a clear vision of where you are aiming and therefore makes the work you do more focused and more meaningful.
Once you’ve picked your field then you need to work tremendously hard in that field to get ahead of any competition around you. What if someone has picked the field you’ve picked, loves it more than you do and will work harder than you do — there may be room for success for the two of you but one is certainly going to do better than the other. You must love your field and be happy to work hard in that field — committed to your goal. The field I’ve picked is renewable energy with a specific focus on solar power. I’m committed to working harder than the people around me in that field.
Sacrifice
In the aid of commitment you sadly need to sacrifice a lot. I’ve sacrificed virtually everything so far. Because I know that there is someone else out there who has also sacrificed everything — you have to at least match the competition and hopefully do better overall. By sacrifice I mean to take your time that is spent elsewhere and focus it on your goal. Like spending less so you can save more. It’s the exact same philosophy with time — you need to cut off the things that are wasting your time.
This is where you need to understand yourself and your limits. Because you need to stay sane, you can’t drive yourself crazy because then you’re no use to anyone. As it turns out, I’m quite lucky with my limits in the fact that I’m happy to work constantly and stay well-balanced. So I was able to cut out every hobby and every factor of my life that took up my time that didn’t contribute to my overall goal. Everything besides drumming and the gym as I still believe it’s beneficial to get exercise in. This is a good point to bring up — sometimes, you watching an hour of TV each day actually gives you the ability to work hard for the other 17 (depending on your sleep routine). So, understand yourself, ruthlessly cutting away your unrelated activities may not be the best thing for you. However, I would recommend going 100% in for a week to see if you can handle it, because if you can — you need to exploit that.
Sustainability
While it’s great to talk about how hard we’re going to work… It’s not good enough to do it for a week. You need to be able to sustain it. The game of success is long-term. This again where you have to experiment to learn about yourself and understand what you can and can’t do. If you overwork yourself, it’s tough to get back on the bandwagon after that — it’s a complete demotivator. You need to take care of yourself. Do a bit of testing and find out where your breaking point is — then you are aware of what confides you are working in.
Start small, if you’re working full-time then commit 10 hours of your spare time per week for a month. Then do 20 hours the next month. Then 25. Then 30. Find out where is most optimal for you to work effectively and efficiently. Then stay there, don’t deviate from your proven formula. Stay there for 2 years. After those 2 years, you’ll have an unbelievable amount of opportunities come through. Soon enough you’ll be able to commit the other 40 hours you were working into your goal as well. All things end up as an exponential growth — you’ll soon be on track to commit 100–120 hour work weeks to your end goal. Do that for 10 years — see where you end up.
Final thoughts
I think those that are reading this understand the factors of hard work and therefore they inadvertently understand the factors of success. I just think that more people need to take the leap and go for it. Nevertheless, I believe the three elements to hard work for success are your commitment level, the sacrifices you’re prepared to make and your ability to sustain that over the long term.
I believe if you stop looking at what everyone else is doing and focus completely on those factors for a few decades then you will achieve high levels of success. It’s as simple as that, there are no tricks, no strategies— just hard work. Find a way to commit the highest levels of hard work you can without killing yourself, sustain that and then see where it takes you. I guarantee the results will be astronomically better than if you were to spend your time searching for the next bitcoin.
