The System of Success

Success is the result of habits. No one achieved lasting, sustainable success through luck or “just being good at it”. The success came from deliberate, consistent, and habitual action.

So often we hear so much about how important it is to be motivated. We search endlessly for inspiration. We gauge our ability to do good work by how much we enjoy it, by how much we’re able to get into a flow while working. I’ve done the same myself my whole life, and it’s overrated.

How do the most successful people achieve their goals and missions in life? By working on the most important things first.

In the past, I’ve become distracted by things that didn’t matter as much. I might log into email, looking at and reading emails for hours without sending any. I might sit down to study, and remember something I had to do on facebook. I’d sit down to write a blog post, and then spend my time browsing other peoples’ blogs.

The thing that helped me change my habits was adopting a system to focus my time. I simply set a certain amount of time for certain actions, and quit when the time was up, regardless of whether I finished or not. I made sure that even if I started late I respected my schedule and took the breaks I set for myself.

What’s astonishing is that our work shrinks or expands to how much time we have to do it. 4 hour reading were finished in 2 hours. I finished a 6 page paper in 1 hour. I emailed 8 people in 20 minutes. Even more important, I had time to rest and replenish, got more sleep, and was able to spend time with my friends or calling my family guilt-free.

It’s an ongoing process. One of the biggest things I learned is that I must respect my schedule and not change it once set, even if I wake up late and miss my first chunk of work.

Nature is filled with systems, like this bee collecting pollen.

It might sound daunting, but every time we put our keys on a key rack at home, we’re utilizing a system. It allows us to focus on more important things without having to worry about looking around for our keys every time we need them. I’d advocate all of us to begin consciously integrating more systems into our lives so we can achieve the success we seek and lived the lives we dreamed.

So, what’s one way you can introduce a system into your own life?

Where are you headed?

Because it matters more than where you are now.

If I’m preparing for a big fight, it doesn’t matter that I’ve been for the past week. It doesn’t matter that I can touch my toes while stretching. It doesn’t matter that I can lift xyz pounds. What matters is that I need to be ready to win when my fight comes. I’m headed towards that win, and all the small successes I’ve had pale in comparison to where I need to be. It keeps going until I’ve won the fight.

When blogging, it doesn’t matter that I’ve kept up for 20 days. It doesn’t matter that I’ve missed a lot of days recently. What matters is that I’m focusing on keeping up the practice. What matters is posting right now. What matters is that I get ready for days ahead when I feel like skipping by preparing draft posts.

It’s tempting to stop and look at the progress we’ve made in whatever endeavor we’re undertaking. It’s important to do so, to see what our next step is. The danger is allowing those small successes lull us into comfort and inaction.

We must remember our destination. We must remember our vision of where we’re headed. It help keep us on track, and encourages us to keep moving forward when we might otherwise be induced to come to a halt. With any project, endeavor, and with your life, ask, “what’s my potential”?

Another lesson I took from this was to focus on seeking out discomfort.

What’s an example from your own life of focusing on the end goal over getting complacent?

How to Turn a Failure into a Success

There are many ways to do this. I’ve recently discovered one way, and it turns on where our focus lies.

The key is in the finishing.

When I got into the University of Washington, I had a great first quarter. Then I faltered the next few quarters, and my GPA teetered around the 3.0 mark. I felt socially awkward, hadn’t joined in many student orgs, and felt a huge lack of motivation.

The summer before my last year, I began putting in much more effort. I took up a position in the fraternity, putting vision for recruitment into action. I became very fit, working out every day for a month. Finally, I had a spiritual experience studying Sikhi in India. Coming back to UW, I lead new, innovative projects in my fraternity, got my highest grades in my time at UW, and enjoyed great times with friends. I finished my time there with a bang.

Here in law school, I had a rough and largely unsuccessful first semester. Yet, the 1L year is not finished yet and I’m hardly close to finished with my Law school experience. How I finish will shape the entire experience.

In our musical, TORT (Theater of the Relevantly Talent-less), I came in having missed the first of only 6 weekly practices. I felt lost and confused most of the time. Yet at our performance, I gave it 110% on the last night. My dancing went well, and I pushed each small scene and roll I occupied, giving it all the enthusiasm I had. That’s what people will remember me for. All prior failures are ignored for the final resounding success.

So, if you’ve experienced a failure recently, keep up hope. What matters is not how you’ve done in the past, but how you finish. I find this very empowering, since it means that at any moment I have the power to turn my life around or take it to another level. What’s especially helpful is crafting a vision for the future 5, 10, 20 years from now.

What’s one endeavor in which you can finish with success?

It doesn’t matter who’s ahead or behind during the game, but who wins when the clock winds down that matters.

Re-framing Your Vision

Last night, I sat down to do my daily reflection. As I wrote about my responsibilities, I realized I’ve allowed myself to view tasks as burdens rather than opportunities to do amazing work.

One instance is this blog. In the beginning, I had great expectations and intentions. Over time, It turned into a burden. With a little re-framing, I allowed myself to get excited about writing a post again. By asking myself what it was an opportunity for, I realized that I could use this to share things with the world and hopefully inspire positive change, improve my own writing and communication, develop a habit of writing daily, and explore my own thoughts and insights while reaching new ones. This simple act of re-framing helped me to get more excited about writing posts.

Finding Peace

It’s not in a new Yoga membership at the local hot Yoga club. True Peace must be attained in the everyday stresses of life.

These days, consumerism and media influence have us buying things to gain ‘inner peace’. We might travel to India to learn from a Guru, get a membership to a Yoga club, or just smoke weed and listen to really transcendent music. I think all of this things can aid in a journey to peace, but they’re hardly the end product of True Peace.

Turning Hate on its Head

A few days ago, Sikh Coalition sent an email about some racist t-shirts posted on cafepress. A picture of the t-shirts, via huffpost, is below. (a blog post about it here)

At first glance, I thought Sikh Coalition made the shirts in protest of the words ‘towelhead’ and ‘raghead’. I thought, “Great! Where can I get one?” As I examined closer, I realized they were intended to be racist.

I told my mistake to a few friends, who all found it funny. Then I thought, “why not wear the shirts myself?” Honestly, it would be pretty funny to see a Sikh wearing the shirt, and would completely undermine the hateful nature of the remark. I’d find it pretty funny too.

Changing Lives and Living Well

The Problem

It’s so easy to go through life just completing the task at hand quickly without much thought. It’s a product of the education system, where we’re simply told what we need to do next, and what kind of performance achieves what type of grade. Doing the minimum for the grade gets us through school just fine, and we’re gently urged toward thinking passively about life.

Yet how would we feel 5, 10, 20 years from now? Looking back on our lives, would we feel comfortable knowing that we did the bare minimum, trying to chug through each day to get to the next task to chug through?

Leaders We Need

We need leaders of need, not leaders of want.

A leader of want just wants to lead for the look. They want to lead for the resume. They want to lead to exert control and power over others. They might contribute to an organization, but only as long as it serves their purposes. The organization, to derive any benefit from a leader of want, must tailor to his needs. This gives rise to false forms of leadership.

Girltalk

I saw a video by a feminist asking critical questions of movies. There are three questions to ask to measure the female presence in a film, called the Bechdel Test.

1. Are there 2 or more women in it who have names?
2. Do they talk to each other?
3. Do they talk to each other about something other than a man?

You’d be surprised by the number of films that fail the test. The Lord of the Rings series, the Batman series, Up, Toy Story, to name a few that surprised me. Watch the video here for a full list.