The discussion of what makes us successful has been going on for a considerable period of time.  Many of us are tempted to fall for fads, schemes or popular culture concerning the meaning and methods for achieving success in our lives.  Many of us have come to believe that success is about setting personal goals, and tracking our progress on those goals.  Others view success as a “life purpose” that we seek to accomplish.

Many of these perspectives contain important elements of truth, but many of them are also missing some very important elements.  By understanding these key factors of personal, professional, and professional achievement, we can learn how to create our own vision of success.

The first step on the journey toward our life’s goals and purpose is to create a clearer picture of what they look like.  Each person’s ambitions are unique, but many people share a common passion for some area of interest in their life, and a desire to pursue those interests.  When we develop a vision of the direction that we would like our lives to move, it frequently involves the ability to spend more time engaged in the activities that we enjoy.  This frequently leads us to believe that they key to success is simply to attain more of what we want.

More is Not Always More

The common conception that many people hold is that they will feel more fulfilled in their life if they can simply achieve more.  More money, a nicer car, a bigger house, more vacation, more time to follow their interests.  The implicit problem that we run into when thinking in the context of “more” is that our time is a finite quantity.  Each day only contains 24 hours, and there is only so much that we can fit into that amount of time.

Thus, the pursuit of more becomes a study in time scarcity.  Assuming that we are able to attain the additional things that we want, it is highly likely that they will create additional time commitments that we must undertake.  When these time commitments are added to our existing schedule, it frequently leaves us with more to do than we have time to do things.  This abundance of projects and scarcity of time frequently leaves us shorting the aspects of our life that are highly important (such as personal relationships) but not articulated on our sheet of goals.

What you Subtract is More Important than What you Add

The next level of insight in the attainment of success is to understand that our most important decisions are frequently not what to add, but what to take away.  The only way that we can avoid a permanent time crunch that leaves our friends and family out in the cold is to re-arrange our personal, professional, and financial priorities on a consistent basis.  This means that when we add something, we must be prepared to take something else away.

In the real world, trade-off decisions are a fact of life.  We cannot have our cake and eat it too.  There are decisions that must be made, and the way that we make those decisions will have a tremendous impact on our future.  The way that we can keep our life in balance is to continually monitor our balance of activities to determine when it is time to add something and when it is time to remove something or change the way we do it.

Success is an Equilibrium, Not an Achievement

What all of this ultimately means is that “real” success is not an achievement … it is an equilibrium.  It is a balance of things we want and things we do that deliver the most total happiness and satisfaction that we are able to achieve.  Unfortunately, there are very few success authors who are teaching this truism, and there are many people who are seeking success in the context of goals and achievements.

Granted, goals are very important.  However, goals are not the end … the are a means.  For example, many people profess a desire to run a marathon as a goal in their life.  What most people really mean by this goal is that they would like to adjust the equilibrium of their life in such a way that they can increase their level of fitness to a state where they can train to successfully run a marathon.  However, what this goal-setting process frequently misses is that it is possible to complete a marathon without being in optimal fitness (albeit at a slow pace), and that it is possible to achieve considerable fitness without ever running a marathon.

What happens when we place too much emphasis on the goals themselves is that the equilibrium can be lost.  The desire to run a marathon can come to dominate our thoughts and actions.  (Especially for Type-A folks)  In this way, the goals we are seeking can take on an obsessive nature that displace many of the other highly important aspects of our life in the single pursuit of a particular goal.

As we go throughout our lives, we should seek to keep our goals and ambitions in perspective so that they are viewed in the context of our life’s larger equilibrium.  This is the way that we can stay balanced and pursue the “real” success that is a (whole) life that we want to live.  The decisions that we make will all echo throughout our future, so it is important to choose wisely.

 

One of the famous scenes from JR Tolkein’s book series “The Lord of the Rings” is when Frodo the Hobbit is talking with Gandalf the Wizard about his quest to destroy the ring of power.  Frodo remarks that he wishes the ring had not come to him, and that it was not his burden to bear.  To this, Gandalf replies that Frodo’s sentiment is shared by all people who face difficult times.  But the times you live are not for you to decide.  All that we can decide is what to do with the time we are given.

This scene is very metaphoric for the current economic environment that has left many people wishing for better days or complaining about the burdens of a floundering economy.  It is a time where painful changes are being forced on the populace by market realities and government fiat.  However, we as individuals are not give a choice about the times we live in.  The only choice that any of us really have is about what to do with the time that we are living.

As such, it logically follows that we should seek to focus on the parts of our life that we can actually control.  Said another way, we should concentrate our thoughts and actions on our sphere of influence instead of our sphere of awareness or sphere of concern.  This isn’t to say that we should ‘check out’ from the world . . . knowledge of the local, national, and global marketplace is all a part of making decisions within our sphere of influence.  However, most of us would be well served by resigning our self-appointed post as “General Manager of the Universe” and concentrating our efforts on the pieces of our world that we can control.

Part and parcel to this is the understanding that your life is shaped by our decisions.  Both our good decisions and our bad decisions impact the course of our life.  Most of us seek to take credit for all of our decisions that turn out good, and seek somebody to blame when things take a downward turn.  We want to blame the government, big business, the Fed, or just about anybody else we can.  However, the fact still remains that the investments we chose went down in value.  We didn’t know they would go down … otherwise we wouldn’t have bought it.  Before we can make much progress in our lives, we mus take ownership of the decisions that we make.

The hidden wisdom of this change in perspective is that it actually bestows more personal power.  When we are faced up against a big nameless power, we can easily succumb to a feeling of inevitable helplessness.  However, when our focus shifts to the things that we can control, it puts an entirely different spin on the time that we are given in our lives.  We may not be able to control and influence everything, but we can learn to make the most of what we are able to influence and let go of the things that are out of our control.

It is only by learning to look past what is out of our control that we can learn to focus on what is within our control.  The way that we make the most of the time that we are given is by doing the most with what we can control.  In the end, each of us has a supreme choice to make.  That choice is how we choose to spend the time that we are given to live on the earth.  The quality of our time will depend on the decisions and choices that we make.  It is incumbent upon each individual person to choose wisely.

 

There is a famous statement that an optimist will see a glass half that is full, while a pessimist will see a glass that is half empty.  The basis behind these distinctions is that people who possess a more optimistic worldview tend to focus on what is there, what is present, what is available.  Conversely, people who possess a more pessimistic worldview tend to focus on what is missing, what is gone, what cannot be attained.

To many people, the color of reality is closer to the view of the pessimist than the optimist.  After all, life isn’t fair.  The nice guy always seems to finish last.  Vast inequality exists between people and between countries that defy many people’s imagination.  How can somebody possibly be an optimist?  Optimism seems to be the province of a foolish Pollyanna type worldview that fails to comprehend reality.

The Truth of Reality

In order to objectively examine the quality and power of our worldview, it is important to gain an understanding of the true and full nature of reality.  Simply put, reality is what is.  Reality is and only can be what exists, what is here, what is present.  Reality must be something … it must contain a form.  Reality must be defined by substance, it cannot be defined by a vacuous and subjective notion of what is missing.

Understanding this fundamental truth focuses the context of our experience, and allows us to live in the world of what is.  By focusing our attention on what is, instead of allowing ourselves to be distracted by wants and wishes, it creates a much more solid basis upon which to act.  Accepting what is does not mean that we cannot create change … it means that we understand how change works within the context of our present reality.  We must influence our reality in order to change it.

The Power of the Optimist

The power of seeing a half full glass comes from the focus on objective reality that can only spring from what is.  The reason for this is because our only point of influence on reality comes when we change the nature of what is.  This requires us to focus on the things we can influence, and only the things we can influence.  Most people waste their creative power by obsessing on what they feel to be missing, , what they feel to be wrong, or what they feel to be unfair.

The power of the optimist flows from their focus on what is available and what is present.  Most people possess far more power to influence their life than they are able to understand.  Our futures can be definitively shaped by the decisions that we make.  As the quality of these decisions increase, and as the proximity of these decisions converge on the segments of our life that we can influence and change, our control on the future increases.

Possibility Exists Beyond the Reach of Blame

A principal problem in the interactions between most people, companies, and governments is that too much discussion revolves around blame.  A prevalent destructive assumption is that anything which goes wrong must be somebody’s fault.  This creates a fire storm of blame shifting and blame deflecting.  To the person who seeks to influence the course of their future, they must learn to look beyond whose fault the problem is, and focus on what can be done to improve the future.

To the extent that mistakes are or have been made, it is important to learn from them so that they are not repeated.  However, excessively focusing on who is to blame for mistakes all but guarantees a lack of future achievement.  Even when bad things happen to us that we do absolutely nothing to cause, we must understand that our lives exist in a reality of random events that are largely beyond our control.  Railing out against the person who caused our hardship does absolutely nothing to improve our situation.

When understood and applied properly, these principals create a tremendous base of power for us to influence our personal, professional, and financial lives.  Many of our personal relationships encounter difficulties when we blame one another for problems or mistakes.  Many of our workplace problems revolve around assigning blame, shifting blame, and attempting to avoid blame.  Many of the financial problems that people work themselves into evolve from an unwillingness to admit past mistakes and learn.

In the end, each of us possesses the power to influence the course of our personal, professional, and financial future.  Unfortunately, there are startlingly few who choose to use this power.  Too many people allow their pride, politics, and emotions to block the actions and decisions that can shape the course of their future.  Too many people cannot let go of their conceptions about the problems and unfairness of life, and fail to create the changes in their own life and the lives of people about them that can help to bring about the changes they desire.  Each of us must make our own choices, must decide how we will view the glass, and mus take ownership over the future direction of our life.

 

There is a disturbing trend among both people and politicians to find somebody to blame for each setback, difficulty, or annoyance they experience.  This phenomenon frequently provides a convenient alibi for failure, as some opaque persona such as ‘big business’ or ‘the man’ is blamed for our problems.  The most critical danger of focus on these ghosts of failure is that they give us a subconscious excuse to avoid doing what is necessary for success.  However, the realization of our goals, dreams, and aspirations will require many of us to ‘man up’ (or ‘woman up’ as the case may be) to make our goals happen.

The importance of ‘making it happen’ cannot be overstated, since it shifts the responsibility for our circumstances squarely onto our shoulders.  This means that we can no longer place the responsibility for our wellbeing onto other people (or politicians) and must take full accountability for our achievements and failures.  This means that if there are great things we want to achieve, that we must personally take action.  If there is something that we want to do in the future, we must first become educated and then we must take action.  If things don’t turn out the way we wanted, it is our responsibility to study our decisions and learn what we can do differently next time.

Make Your Own Luck

There is a popular aphorism that you make your own luck.  While this is not completely true, it contains a valuable nugget of insight.  Luck is a factor that is beyond our realm of control.  However, we have supreme control over whether we will be prepared to reap the benefits when fortune turns in our favor.  Every person experiences opportunities that emerge throughout the course of their lives.  However, not all people are willing or able to capitalize on opportunity when it occurs.  Thus, by perpetually preparing yourself to capitalize on opportunity, you will be able to create the conditions for success when luck turns in your favor.

The truth is that we each have the ability to influence the shape and course of our personal, professional, and financial future.  The decisions we make create the basis for our future achievements.  Each step that we take builds on the actions and decisions that we made in the past.  We make our future happen through intelligent decisions.  If we want to enhance the trajectory of our future, we only need to increase the number of intelligent decisions that we make.  In this way, our part of success boils down to a science of increasing our velocity of intelligent decisions.

We may not be able to directly create the luck that we need to achieve all of our ambitions, but we can make the conditions happen that will allow fortune to smile on us.  If we truly wish to achieve our ambitions, we must move beyond ‘hoping’ that they happen and embark on a journey to ‘make’ them happen.  This is likely to involve a significant intellectual commitment, but is a matter of critical importance to our personal, professional, and financial lives.

In practice, this mindset is quite liberating since it frees us from the constant feeling that we are being held down by somebody else.  The counterpoint to that mental freedom is the realization that all of the obstacles in our way that prevent us from achieving success are really self-imposed.  The truth is that those self-imposed obstacles have always been there . . . it’s just that we were previously unaware of their existence based on a belief that something external was responsible for our failure.  Once we become aware of our ability to influence our own achievements, it becomes our responsibility to identify and remove the obstacles that we have placed in our own way.

 

One of the things that we like to do is human beings is to fantasize about how our lives would be different if something were different.  It turns out that this mode of thinking produces two distinctive outputs.  The first is that it allows our minds to drift into a world where events unfold exactly as we would like.  The second is that by using the word if, it absolves our minds of any responsibility for making our dreams a reality.

The effect is very subtle, but it is still very powerful.  By thinking about our life if our dreams became reality, it sub-consciously reinforces the belief that our dreams will stay dreams.  A much more productive mode of thought is to consider how we can traverse the distance from where our current mode in life to where we want to be.  This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t dream about what life could be like, and use that as a vision to inspire our actions.  It simply means that we should not give ourselves an easy way out of failing to achieve our dreams.

The Power of How

By shifting our mental efforts to considering how to accomplish our goals, it triggers a very important shift within our consciousness.  It changes the context of our ambitions from something that we would like, but probably won’t ever get to something that we are creating a plan to go out and attain.  It may be that our first plan doesn’t work.  It may be that our plans need to change.  However, it is always true that nothing will happen unless we take action.

Another important piece of asking how to reach our goals is that it broadens our perspective.  It forces us to consider the causal chain that spans the distance and traverses the obstacles between where we currently are, and where we want to be.  Allowing ourselves to escape this analysis can bring our progress toward the goals and ambitions of life to a screeching halt.  It is almost always true that achieving our ambitions requires many thing to come into place.  It is also true that most of these things will not fall into place by themselves.  Unfortunately, when we think in terms of if, it robs us of the opportunity to organize the events of our life in a way that builds a bridge to our ambitions.  In order to make sure that we construct this bridge, it is critically important to think in the context of how.

Turning How into When

Once we have mentally constructed the map of how our goals can be achieved, it is important to shift our attention to thinking of when this will all happen.  The reason for this is because time is a finite resource.  Of all the resources that are available to us, time is the only one that we cannot produce more of.  Each day contains only 24 hours, each week contains only 7 days and each year only contains 12 months.  There is a practical limit to how much we can do (well) at any given time, so we must prioritize our activities to ensure that the things we hold most important are addressed first.

The notion of priorities is critically important when we traverse the distance between thinking of how to accomplish our goals and figuring when it will happen.  Everybody can create a list of things they would like to do and accomplish that is many miles long.  However, very few people have created a list of priorities that is reflected in their actions.  Most of us act on whatever happens to be the most urgent item of the moment and allow our priorities that are not immediately urgent to slip into the back of our mind until they are all but forgotten.

Ultimately, the factor that will most strongly influence when our goals become reality is where they land in our personal, professional, and financial priorities.  Each decision that we make is an implicit decision not to do something different.  Similarly, pursuing one set of goals is an implicit decision to ignore or delay another set of goals.  Because of this, we must be very mindful of what we prioritize and what we pursue so that we do not ignore things that are of greater importance for the sake of something with greater urgency.

Thinking of Possibilities

One of the buzzwords that has emerged in the popular vernacular over the past decade is “possibility thinking.”  In simple terms, this is a method of thinking how things ‘could’ be organized to create better outcomes.  The basis of the thought process is to avoid anchoring on the way that things work today and think in an unconstrained fashion to discover new solutions.  This mode of thinking can be very helpful in the context of our personal, professional, and financial goals.  Instead of starting with where we are in life, start with where we want to be.  Instead of attempting to trace steps forward from our current position into the future, trace steps from the future back to the present.

By changing the context of our thoughts, we can change the direction of our lives.  By changing the way we think about the world around us, we will change the way we interact with the world around us.  In this way, the way we think creates ripples that affect the way we act, which influences what we achieve.  Thus, the first step toward achieving your goals is to carefully craft the way that you think about your goals.

 

The current world is becoming very polarized and divisive.  There is an increasing trend of people to think and act as groups, instead of as individuals.  The subtleties of unique individualism are being concatenated into “black” and “white” or “Republican” and “Democrat.”  The problem that is created by this brand of mass conformity is that people stop looking to learn from people that are not a part of their group.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is famous for his belief that every person possesses some talent that exceeds his own, and that each interaction with another person gave him an opportunity to learn.  I believe that it would be wise for each of us to extend this philosophy into our own lives.  There is an unfortunate tendency in popular culture that has created a “cult of success” where people that show their financial affluence are worshiped and followed religiously by people who think that copying every facet of that person’s life will make them equally successful.

One of the important points that people frequently overlook is that luck plays an important part in many stories of fabulous success, and another even more prescient point to understand is that many things in life are more important than money.  Of all the important things that are ignored, this is probably the most frequent occurrence.  The reason for this is because wealth is quantitative … it is some thing we can easily measure.  However, relationships are qualitative … there is not a simple way to measure the quality and value of our relationships.  Unfortunately, this leads many to believe that the qualitative relationships possess less value because their value is difficult to compute.

In practice, the purpose behind building quantitative wealth is for the nurturing and maintaining our qualitative relationships.  Because of this, lifetime learning takes on an entirely new context.  Our learning takes on a magnitude that is much greater than simply earning money.  Because of this, the context of learning takes on two distinctive flavors … namely, learning what we “should” do and learning what we “should not” do.

Learning What To Do

It is important for us to seek out people whose holistic success we wish to mimic.  One pitfall that we must seek to avoid is the belief that the we can mimic a certain aspect of a person’s life without any spillover to other sections of our lives.  In truth, everything that we do has some impact on everything else that we do.  As such, when we are seeking coaching and mentoring, we should think in the context of both the skills we want to build and the person that we want to become.

Learning What Not To Do

An equally important aspect of learning is learning what we want to avoid.  In this way, we can shape the form and direction of our personal, professional, and financial lives.  The problem that many people encounter is an excessive emphasis on the factors that create external signs of success, but ignore the relationships and personal growth that is not on display to the public.  It is not a secret that many affluent businesspeople and celebrities are very unhappy, in spite of their financial success.  Thus, we see that in some cases learning what NOT to do can be just as powerful as learning what behaviors to mimic.

In the end, there are tremendous opportunities for gain available to people with the humility to constantly seek learning opportunities.  It is worth noting that these opportunities are not always easy to embrace, since they frequently involve admitting that previously held beliefs and actions were ill informed, rashly decided, or simply wrong.  These are not always the most pleasant of thoughts to embrace, but people who are willing to undertake this thought exercise will reap great rewards over the tenure of their lives.  It is certainly true that there is something we can learn from everybody, and that developing the discipline to learn will enable each person to walk on a path of constant improvement.

 

Recently, much attention has been brought to the topic of inequality … most specifically, inequality of wealth and income.  Underlying this attention is a fundamental belief that some people are able to earn a level of income that is disproportionately high relative to other people on the economic ladder.  This belief stems from a misunderstanding of the difference between a person’s ability and their production. At first blush, these two attributes feel tightly related … and in many respects they are.

Most people require some measure of ability in order to produce a product or service of value.  The desire to develop ability is why people attend college, and it is what most people perceive as the driver of our ability to earn an attractive income.  The link that many people fail to appreciate is that our total value as an employee or entrepreneur is based on their ability, and amplified by the financial and organizational leverage of their business organization to create production.

This generates an effect that has caused tremendous misunderstanding.  The compensation of corporate executives has received a considerable amount of attention in recent years.  Many news reports show how CEO’s earn a high multiple of the earnings for an average employee at a corporation.  Most people who see this feel that there is no possible way the CEO can be 40, 50, 100, or 200 times as valuable as the average worker.  This is where the difference between ability and production becomes important.  The CEO’s ability to drive value is based on their ability, amplified by the organizational leverage of the business.  The CEO does not possess 50 or 100 times the ability of the average worker, but is able to use organizational leverage to drive 50 to 100 times the results or more.

What Does This Mean For Me?

There is something important that each of us can take away from these insights about ability and production.  In order for each of us to fulfill the greatest potential for our professional and financial achievement, we must find a way to employ organizational and financial leverage to amplify our ability so that it produces exceptional results.  This means that our professional and financial walk should focus on both the acquisition of superior skills and the opportunity to leverage those skills so that they generate exceptional results.

Once we understand the importance of production vs. ability, it becomes apparent that a narrow view of ability misses much of the picture when it comes to driving results.  Unfortunately, this has become fodder for politicians advancing a “class warfare” platform where they attempt to use people’s frustration with the unfairness of life to garner support for their candidacy.  The truth is that life is not fair, and most of us would be very unhappy if it were.  The simple fact that a person is born in the United States of America means that they will have access to more opportunity than nearly 80% of the world’s population.

People who live in the United States don’t necessarily possess any more ability than people from other countries.  However, they are able to leverage their abilities to a much greater extent than those other people to produce greater results.  The dramatic inflow of immigrants to the United States stands as a testament that people seek the opportunity to leverage their abilities so that they produce greater results.  From both our personal standpoint, and from the perspective of the larger economy, this demands a simultaneous focus on both enhancing our personal abilities and figuring out how we can leverage those abilities to generate greater productive results.

Equality vs. Achievement

In the current political environment, much attention has been steered toward equality and the lack of equality in regard to incomes and achievement.  The way that these large inequalities emerge in a free market is by competition for the best business talent by entities who can leverage that talent to produce very large results.  What happens is that the people selected to lead these large enterprises are compensated very highly because the results they can drive exceeds their compensation many times over.  To many people, this feels inherently unfair.  However, it is a necessary component of generating optimal productive output for the economy.

The way that economies grow is by people and businesses creating new products and services.  The way that individuals benefit from this is by the opportunities that emerge to both work for these new businesses and enjoy the new products that these businesses create.  Thus,the path to affluence means that there must be freedom to create, risk of failure, and rewards for success.  This is something that we must understand in our personal rise to achievement.

One thing that we should be careful to avoid is the assumption that all inequality is identical, and all profits are equal.  Some companies profit from creating products and services that people voluntarily purchase, while others “profit” by lobbying the government for special contracts, trade protection, or other regulatory advantages.  The former example is what drives economic growth.  The latter is nothing but a drag on the real output of others.  Unfortunately, the earnings reported to wall street make no distinction where the profits of a business come from.

This represents a conflict for those seeking greater equality, since the graft of people who use the power of government to enrich themselves appear to be the same as those who legitimately create useful products and services.  There is also a cautionary note that we should take notice of, since the great affluence we enjoy in the United States can be dismantled quickly if the capitalist system is torn down.  Similarly, the size of the government-entitlement regulatory system is not sustainable.  In order to reclaim the future, we need to create both people of ability and opportunities to leverage that ability.

In the end, most of us do not possess the ability to singlehandedly alter public policy.  However, we do have the ability to impact the decision we make in our own life.  Thus, we should all seek to simultaneously increase our own personal abilities and seek opportunities to leverage that ability so that it produces greater results.  This represents more than an opportunity to create results for ourselves … it is a channel for growth of the larger economy through our efforts.

 

A curious aspect of the human condition is how we are much better at understanding scarcity than abundance.  Our minds naturally gravitate toward what we do not have, instead of noticing what we possess.  Some observers have astutely noticed that every abundance creates a new scarcity.

However, it is an interesting thought experiment to consider what our life would be like if the things that we currently consider to be the most scarce and expensive suddenly became abundant and cheap?  How would our perceptions of value and our priorities shift?  What things that we currently ignore would we begin to shift our attention toward?

The interesting twist is that this transition has already happened in the realm of information.  Before the advent of the internet, information was scarce, expensive, and difficult to acquire.  As the global online marketplace emerged, it created a situation where a literal wealth of information was available to all people in all places.  Suddenly there was a flattening of access to a valuable commodity that had previously been the exclusive property of some, but almost completely unavailable to others?  How has our life changed since we all gained access to the insights and information of the internet?  What new things have we been able to learn?  What new insights have we been able to uncover?  How has our life been enriched?

Of course, there will certainly be those who point out the abundance of low quality content that prevails on the internet.  These observations are completely correct, but are almost totally irrelevant.  The presence of great abundance almost always means that the abundant resource will be wasted in some manner or another.  Since many people grew up in a world of expensive information, it feels unnecessarily wasteful to have low quality information floating around the internet.  The thing that most people miss is how this apparent waste is the laboratory out of which we gain new ideas and insights.

Growth and development is not a linear process.  It is a jagged line that moves up and down, backward and forward.  In order for great new things to happen, there must be the appropriate conditions for the new innovations to emerge.  Abundance allows those conditions to occur without the necessity of being planned or funded by a central authority.  By extension, this means that more experimentation happens with new ideas, and more innovative breakthroughs are discovered.  Of course, this also means that many seemingly useless ideas will be advanced.  However, this apparent ‘waste’ is actually a critical part of innovation and advances.

What Does Abundance Mean To Me?

An important point for us to consider as individuals is the impact to our persona lives if the things that we found the most scarce such as money and time, suddenly became ubiquitously available?  What would you do with your life if you never needed to work in order to live?  What would your life be like if people lived to be 500 years old?  How would your priorities change if a scarcity of today turned into an abundance of tomorrow?  What things that you neglect today would you notice tomorrow?

The reason why this thought exercise is important is because it helps us to clarify what we truly consider to be important.  There are certainly some people who would allow themselves to become idle if they no longer needed to earn money to live, but there are many others who would endeavor to help others acquire the blessings that they have come to enjoy.  When we no longer have to spin our wheels just to get by, it allows us pause to search for meaning.

The clincher is that most people seek meaning at some point in their life, and many wait for far too long before taking the intellectual journey.  This is not to say that we should neglect the things that we need to do today such as earn an income or care for our families … only to say that we should also think of the things that we will pursue when scarcity turns into abundance.  In truth, it frequently comes to pass that the things we perceive as being scarce today will be less scarce in the future, and may possibly be available in great abundance.

Each of us should take a moment to think about the things that we would want to do, and the person that we would want to be if the constraints of our present life were removed.  The power of this thought process is that it underlines how there is very little stopping us from working toward that goal today.  We may not live in a world with no scarcity, but we also do no live in a world of total scarcity.  In this way, we literally have the ability to shape ourselves into the people that we want to be tomorrow … and we are able to start today.

 

One of the curious aspects of the human condition is that we grow to achieve comfort, but when we achieve that comfort it prevents us from growing.  It has long been said that luxury is the lull to apathy.  In practice, this means that it is difficult to reach new heights if we do not leave our present place.  For most people, this means that personal, professional, or financial growth will require that we “Dial up the Discomfort” of the conversations and decisions that we must make.

The reason why this principal takes on such importance is because we all have a natural tendency to perpetuate the standard quo.  Keeping things going the way that they have been going in the past is the path of least resistance.  The problem is that following the path of least resistance cannot be expected to produce results that are different than what has been achieved in the past.  Fundamentally, this means that each time we wish to expand and grow our personal abilities, we must push beyond the realm of our comfort zone.

Why is Discomfort Necessary?

Whether we are talking about the context of personal, professional, or financial life, dialing up our level of discomfort is necessary to grow and progress.  If our relationships never experience any friction, they will not progress … they will simply stay where they are, and may possibly slip into decline.  If a business never challenges itself to accomplish new goals, it will pass through the stage of maturity and into decline.  If our financial decisions are rooted only in the desire for comfort, it will result in many lost opportunities throughout our career.

Fundamentally speaking, the way that we grow is to break out of our current ‘normal’ and seek out a new equilibrium that generates higher and greater levels of achievement.  Once this has been achieved, a new ‘normal’ is established, and the process begins over again.  The world’s high achievers must learn that constantly challenging the limits of their comfort zone is part and parcel to the growth and development that a high achiever should expect from themselves.

How Far Should We Dial It Up?

Once a person has accepted the necessity of discomfort as a piece of personal, professional, and financial growth, it becomes necessary to determine how far we must push the envelope.  If we push too hard, it can create destructive results from failed ventures, nervous breakdowns, and the like.  Conversely, if we do not push hard enough, we cannot expect to grow and progress.  In order to achieve this “Sweet Spot” of personal and professional development, it becomes necessary that we learn to recognize how much discomfort is necessary without pushing the boundaries so hard that they collapse.

The True Hallmark of Success

The true characteristic that differentiates those who achieve success and everybody else is the number of uncomfortable conversations that they are willing to have.  This does not mean that successful people need to become a “Bull in a China Shop” who constantly disrupt the environment around them.  Rather, it is a testament to the fact that constantly growing means that we will constantly be pushing the boundaries of our comfort zone.

In this way, we should go into each day asking ourselves what we are going to do that pushes our zone of comfort?  What conversations are we willing to have that we would rather put off?  What difficult work are we stalling on by keeping ourselves busy with something else?  What do we avoid by telling ourselves that we will get to it later?  The sooner we develop the ability to take these tasks head-on, the faster our trajectory of personal, professional, and financial growth will accelerate.

In the end, each of us who seek to follow a trajectory of continued growth must find a way to consistently push our personal boundaries of comfort.  The exact way that each person dials up their own level of discomfort will be unique.  However, there is one common characteristic that is shared between the journey of all aspiring achievers.  This common thread is that we must all find a way to push our comfort zone, and find the right way to undertake this task in such a way that it propels us onward and upward, but does not wreak a destructive force upon our lives. Ultimately, this serves as one of the many challenges that all achievers must undertake.  And like all other challenges, ignoring it will not make it disappear.  It will only be accomplished if it is addressed.

 

When traveling on the journey of business and life, many people have a natural inclination to structure their activities to avoid mistakes.  This tendency is quite rational, in light of the fact that most of us learn through our education to prevent mistakes whenever possible.  When going through school, we strive for a high grade point average . . . one mistake can blow the average.  When working at a job, we strive to be promoted . . . one mistake can ruin your career.  The incentives that we regularly face condition us to be perpetually risk averse because of the ever present possibility of failure.

The implicit problem of avoiding failure is that it frequently results in avoiding gain also.  Thus, in our desire to avoid moving backward, we also prevent ourselves from moving forward.  The important insight to internalize is that moving forward toward your goals in spite of mistakes is more important than avoiding mistakes altogether.  Entrepreneurs frequently back into this realization when they discover that there are so many things to do that they cannot possibly be done in anything remotely resembling a mistake free manner.  What frequently ends up happening is that the first area of focus is placed on the things that are most critical to sustaining and growing the business, with improvement and refinement done over time.  The contrary version of this concept is the perfectionist obsession that frequently grips people who work at the pleasure of a manager or executive.

Fail Forward

Many people hold onto a notion of success as a linear climb where one step begets another, which begets another, on and on until your goals have been achieved.  This is typical of the linear western thought patterns.  However, the way that we achieve the things we want isn’t always in a steady climb.  Many times we have to try things that don’t work, learn, try again, learn try again, learn and try again until we achieve our goals.  In the linear world, success is simply a process of building on top of what has already been done until the pile is high enough to reach your ambitions.  in the circular world, success is a winding path that we must discover through an uneven process of experimentation.

To many people, this feels like a maddening process.  The ambiguity and uncertainty of discovering the right decision can be very difficult to maintain.  It is impossible to know if success is simply waiting around the corner or whether it is many miles away.  The opportunity that you have been waiting for may be nearly upon you, or it may be disconnected by a vast expanse of distance and time.  This ferocious uncertainty leads many people to give up.

This is where the “Fail Forward” concept comes into play.  It is not reasonably possible to ensure that everything we do will always work out the way we intend.  However, it is possible to ensure that even if we fail, we learn something important that will help us to move closer to our goals and ambitions in the future.  It is inevitable that we will fall as we go throughout life.  However, falling forward instead of falling backward is a characteristic that can have profound impacts on your long-term success.

Gifts vs. Grit

Many people mistakenly believe that great success is solely the result of superior talent.  However, many studies have confirmed that the characteristic shared by elite performers in nearly every walk of life is that they have spent a tremendous amount of time honing and refining their skills.  Some have come to call this the “10 year rule” … stating that exceptional skill can only emerge after 10 years of continued, focused work and practice.  If elite skill can only be built with this much persistence, it stands to reason that “failing forward” is a critical part of this continued development process.

When people talk about the value of persistence, what they are really referring to is the willingness to push through difficulty, uncertainty, and failure to reach your goals.  Consistently moving forward, even if it does not always feel like your movements are taking you directly toward your goal is the key characteristic that separates the exceptional from the average.  In fact, it provides a significant degree of comfort to those of average abilities, because it shows that an abundance of perseverance can frequently overcome a deficiency of talent.  In many cases, it is talent that starts a person on the path toward elite skill, but it is continued persistent work that takes them to their goal.  If you lack talent, you can substitute consistent, focused effort.

It is truly unfortunate that we have become so conditioned to avoid mistakes.  It is the mistakes that allow us to learn and grow, and ultimately what lay the foundation for greater achievements.  This effect pervades our personal, professional, and financial lives.  It is a dichotomy that many people will need to overcome if they are going to achieve their goals and ambitions.

Fundamentally, this dichotomy comes down to a “Job” mentality of avoiding mistakes, in contrast to an “Entrepreneur” mentality of discovering the ingredients necessary for success.  In the context of our personal, professional, and investment endeavors it is frequently more beneficial to ‘fall forward’ than to ‘hold back’ . . . especially in consideration of the fact that our financial future is becoming more uncertain, and it is becoming less and less likely that our employer, government, or 401k will be able to provide for our future.  Thus, it becomes the responsibility of each individual person to ensure that they are consistently moving forward.