Aspiring to succeed? Whether in business, a profession, or personal endeavors, a simple formula delivers results across the board.
Three elements will get you there:
- Ambition: The desire and drive to succeed in something you passionately believe in and enjoy. Without this, it’s always an uphill battle. In fact, it’s a dream at best and a nonstarter. You can be hardworking, but without the inner fire, the mountain is relentless. As Steve Jobs once said, “The only way to do great work is to love what you do.”
- Discipline: The fortitude to do what you commit to and the work required repetitively. Appreciate that small gains add up to big impact. The “overnight success” is built on a foundation of grit and relentlessness. Muhammad Ali put it perfectly: “I don’t count my sit-ups. I only start counting when it hurts because they’re the only ones that count.”
- Consistency: Sameness, repetitive, mundane, repeated. Do it again and again until you near the ideals of perfection. Then move that bar further in pursuit of the ideal you imagined. As Aristotle wisely noted, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
There’s no magic bullet, no secret hacks. The formula is simple. No new plan, no simple tool, and no sage advice can replace the persistence to do the basics better than you did the day before and keep dreaming.
Success isn’t about sporadic bursts of brilliance. It’s about showing up, day after day, and putting in the work. It’s about falling in love with the process, not just the outcome.
Are you ready to apply this formula to your life? The ingredients are simple, but the results can be extraordinary. Where you are missing the mark, ask yourself, which of the three ingredients are you missing, and then make the change.
