Nobody can deny the success of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg. These all-stars of our world are famous for their seemingly “overnight rise”. These people, however, didn’t start at the top, nor was the overnight rise literally overnight. It is true that most of us work a lifetime and will not get to their level. It is also true that these (and others) did find their success more quickly than most and are considered “outliers” but even these all-stars had to start somewhere and they got there in a series of incremental steps. If you think of the last set of stairs you climbed, you didn’t go from the bottom straight to the top, you had to climb every step. The last time you went on a journey, you didn’t just end up at your destination, you had to travel there. This travel, these steps, and this process are each vitally important to success. In this post I hope to provide some perspective, but some tools and practical frameworks that you can use to get big wins in a realistic way:
- Know your competition
- Break it down into little bits
- Be intentional
- Re-frame setbacks
Know your Competition
Everyone looks around them, at their friends, family, and colleagues and compares their situations. In some cases, they say things like “I’m glad I’m not in his/her shoes”, in others they say things like “I really wish I could be in their shoes.” However, these are the beginning thoughts that lead to downfall because the focus is on someone else rather than yourself. The truth of the matter is that in order for you to get the big wins you want and achieve the level of success you are hoping for, you need to keep focused on yourself. When you focus on someone else, what they have, and where they are at in life, you are not actively working on making yourself better. This is why you have to remember who your key competition is, yourself. If you are competing with yourself this is a competition that you can win and are in direct control of. Think of something that you are capable of doing now, at some point, you had to learn that skill. You are better now than you were before you learned that skill, you got incrementally better. This competition is totally in your control, you could have chosen not to learn that skill, you could have chosen to sit and watch Netflix or even passed along the opportunity to learn to someone else! But instead of doing that, you learned that skill, if you were to compete with your past self, you would win because you know what they don’t. This competition keeps you getting incrementally better.
Break it down into little bits
Very few big things can be done by one person all at once. Whether it is the building you live or work in, the company you work for, or your personal side-projects, all of these, are done in small manageable portions. When competing with yourself it’s important to start by taking stock of what you know right now and what you do not. Then, with what you don’t know, find small pieces that you can accomplish quickly and easily. When you’re just starting out in this process, start with something you can do quickly and easily (the low hanging fruit). Let’s suppose you want to learn a new language. This may seem like a lot, but it is reasonable to expect that you can learn the alphabet with little effort and little time. Once you know the alphabet, you can start learning basic vocabulary. Then you can learn simple sentences “bonjour je m’appelle Lucas.” Eventually, you will start to see the forest and not just the trees. This could be applied to any skill you want to master. In today’s technological age, there are even more supports than ever. Searching how to learn a subject on YouTube will yield so many results of people who were in your shoes once teaching you what they know. When you combine this principle with the competition with yourself, in a very short period of time you will find that you are learning new skills that you didn’t know before and you are better now than you were previously.
Be intentional
There is always an “easy way out.” When you’ve got nothing to do on a Saturday afternoon, how easy is it to binge Netflix? We all do the same thing when we have downtime or at the end of the day, we turn off our brains and we “veg”. I’m not saying that one should never relax, nor am I saying that there isn’t time to watch your favourite show on Netflix. However, there are moments in life that differentiate you and Bill Gates. If you’ve studied Bill at all, he will take retreats with bags of books bigger than my head. Although Bill is an extraordinary person for what he has accomplished in life, he is no different than you in that he has the same 24-hours in a day, he chose to spend his differently. How are you spending your time? It is never as easy to watch an instructional video as it is to watch the hot new action flick. It is never as easy to pick up a book as it is to turn on the TV and surf the channels. It is never as easy to research a topic or subject as it is to turn your brain off and zone out. These, however, are the differentiating factors between the person you want to be and the person that you are. If you break it down and you follow the “break it down into little bits” principles, instead of turning on Netflix, you would turn to YouTube and watch an instructional video because that is a small activity that can lead you to greater understanding which will lead to the greater win in your life.
Re-frame setbacks
Everyone, everywhere, throughout history, has had a setback. The difference between those that are successful and those that are not is how one responds to these setbacks. With that in mind, this aspect of incremental steps leading to big wins is how we respond to setbacks. If I were to refer you back to the stairs illustration in the opening paragraph, this would be as if you missed the step and slid back a couple of steps (or even to the bottom of all the steps). When someone who is successful faces a setback, they put together everything else in this blog post and work toward getting back up the steps. The problem with that is that most people have a tendency to wallow in their misery during a setback. It is important to remember that setbacks happen to everyone and it is important to grieve the loss in a healthy manner. However, once the appropriate amount of time has been given and the appropriate grieving has taken place, it is important to re-frame the setback as an opportunity. The setback doesn’t have to be a loss specifically, it could be something a little less obvious. For instance, you tried to apply the skill you’ve just learned only to realize that you aren’t far enough along and face some embarrassment and other negative effects. Another example is that the skill that you’ve just mastered has turned out to be the wrong skill or your organization has decided to take a different direction and your skill is no longer needed. All of these are difficult, however, start with what you do have. If the company took another direction, your skill isn’t useless, it’s just waiting to be used. If you haven’t learned enough to apply your skillset yet, you just know what you need to focus on learning next. If your setback is a loss of some sort, maybe the space that has been granted is now available for you to do further study. Re-framing these setbacks can have a significant impact on your positive trajectory, so set-back-well.
These principles and practices are simple to read about but hard to implement. They take daily dedication and determination and can only be properly lived out in repetition. I recommend picking one of the principles in the post here and trying to put it into action every day. Maybe it’s taking some of your Netflix time and converting it to instructional video time. Maybe it’s looking at your big objective and finding a small action that can help you get there. Maybe it’s changing the way you think about others and setbacks. Whatever it is, taking some of these steps can help you accomplish your big wins!