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?

Nature’s Gift

A few weeks ago, I had an in-depth conversation with a good friend of mine. We stood near a pit filled with glowing embers from a warm campfire. Enormous, majestic trees stood on all sides of the camp site. The din of campers enjoying each others’ company rose above the crackling of the dying embers. Up above, millions of stars glistened and twinkled brightly against the dark expanse of space. The scene was set for invigorating conversation.

My friend takes a huge interest in computers and technology. Everytime we speak, I find myself amazed by what advances have been made. He’s up on all the TED videos, into programming, and his excitement for the future of technology is clear from his animated and fast-moving lips. Yes, I look at his lips a lot when we talk.

So we got to talking about technology and the direction the human race is headed. The conversation started off by talking about Ishmael. Great book.

As we took off with the conversation, I began by asking how long we humans can really keep up this rouse. This rouse where we take limited resources as if they were unlimited. I asked how we could imagine living in a world we we pollute and trash wherever we can. Great garbage patches swirl through the earth’s oceans, and many of the deep waters are over-fished. Animals and insects go extinct each month as we create more food for ourselves. Seem too outrageous? Maybe, until we consider that swaths of the Amazon rainforest are cut down to make grain to feed cows which serve as meat for us to consume.

So in his response, he mentioned that we as humans will find a way. We have in the past, and will again. He had some good points. With the use of technology, we’re able to accomplish so much more utilizing less and less. He pointed a single finger towards the vast expanse above and asked if we could ever utilize all the resources out there. He’s right, I thought.

Yet something felt off. I mentioned that to make the technology, it takes more and more resources. In the iPhone, the production of each individual phone utilizes hundreds of pounds of CO2 emissions. With each new release, Apple fan people throw out the old in anticipation of the new.

So my friend turned again to technology. We’re on the brink of developing systems to combat this destruction. One of the exciting new developments includes vacuums to filter out the CO2 in the air and alter it’s chemical state or put it back into the ground.

Then it hit me. I looked around. The trees swayed gently in the breeze, ancient and wise.

The trees already filter the air. They turn CO2 into oxygen. Then they reproduce. They provide homes for birds, insects and other wildlife. When a trees passes, it falls and the forest decomposes it, utilizing the nutrients for more life. Nature has all of the solutions we search for.

Things began to clear for both of us. We, as a race, tend to work for solutions to the problems we create by using our hands. We use our hands to research technology to battle greenhouse emissions for instance. Yet, what if what we need is to take our hands off and back up a little bit?

I propose that we each find one way we can scale back. As Bruce Lee once said, “Simplicity is the key to brilliance.”

Tomorrow, how about we try sitting down for 5 minutes and write down a few ways we can do so? For example, I could stop eating meat for a day each week, take a fork and spoon from home to save plastic trash, or buy a water bottle. Pick one and act on it. Feel free to let me know how it goes, and as always, thank you so much for reading.

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?

The Market’s Evolution

Right now, I’m reading Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. In one chapter, he mentions that the most effective way to communicate and get people to do something is to address their personal wants and desires. In the blogosphere, that might be engaging with another blogger’s materials, directing people to her site, and supporting her work rather than simply promoting your own blog.

So I began thinking about where the market’s headed (Seth Godin mentions this in his daily email. Sign up for it). Carnegie mentioned that those people who give selflessly, who consider others’ desires and then their own (not excluding your own, but be aware of both sets of desires), will succeed the most.

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?