Systems of Success

I have been giving a friend gym lessons every weekend. I am not a qualified personal trainer but I have always thought it would be fun to guide someone and watch their physique develop.

It was not so easy to get my friend to get started though. My friend had for goodness knows what reasons signed up for a boxing course with the aim of entering into a competition. He's a skinny guy by nature and had recently been lamenting to me about how he wanted to grow muscle as he was always outmuscled by his sparring partners. But, he said, he did not want to go to a gym because that was beyond his comfort zone. He said that he had been doing bodyweight exercises at home but felt progress was slow. He also had problems motivating himself and would only exercise when he was in the mood for it.

I asked him what exercises he had been doing. Not that I have anything against bodyweight exercises (I used to do them and got a lot out of them), but the nature of the exercises he was doing was like, I told him, trying to box with Manny Pacquiao with one hand tied behind your back. Why do that when you can box with two hands?

I then went into a grand lecture as to how success is a culmination of habits. To achieve success, you must take the necessary actions that cause you to improve. Depending on what you are hoping to achieve, there are many things in life that require constant, habitual actions to bring your goal to fruition - i.e. you create long-term habits in your life that lead you to take actions towards improvement and hence success. And to create habits, you need to have 2 ingredients: 1) knowledge and 2) motivation. This is the road map to success - by accumulating the requisite knowledge and motivate yourself into building long-lasting systems of success. Or so I thought. 

But let's break down this road map again and look at it from the other way round.

Knowledge - My friend did not have knowledge as to the workouts he could do in the gym that would efficiently develop muscle. I gave him a run through verbally on the basic exercises he could do. Problem solved. He could not say anymore that a lack of knowledge was inhibiting him from succeeding in his goal. You now know what you have to do to succeed, I told him.

Motivation - I told him that he had to want to achieve his goal badly enough. There was no point in complaining that his workout regime was not working out if he was someone who exercised in accordance with his moods. I asked him how serious he was about this boxing competition. Did he want it badly enough? Perhaps he was better off pursuing another sport, like chess? He shook his head vehemently and said he wanted it. Then I said ok, then the next thing he has to think about, now that he has the knowledge and the motivation, is to:

Habits - .. is to use the knowledge and motivation to create long-lasting positive habits that would cause him to do things regularly that can help him to succeed. There are ways in which you can make yourself do things on a regular basis for the long term. Taking exercise for example, some people like to have exercise buddies exercise with them every week. Failing to show up would mean letting your buddy down. Some people make a public commitment e.g. on their blog to say they want to exercise every week. That could work as well if social pressure gets you going. I told my friend another way to ensure that he sticks to a routine of exercising every week was to give someone trustworthy a large sum of money that will be forfeited and given to charity if he failed to turn up for the exercise session. But that sum of money had to be big enough so that he feels the pain. I nobly offered myself for this very important role but he rejected my kind offer. Then I offered to help supervise and push him every week if he would come to the gym near my place. He was on for it. That's building a habit for you.

Actions - Then it was just a matter of showing up. First week goes by, second week goes by. You set out to do the things that your habits lead you to do. After a while things become routine and you start to do those actions by autopilot. Any resistance you had towards doing those things start to erode over time and you no longer have to motivate yourself to do those things because they have already become an automatic, habitual action. And over time, the actions accumulate to lead you ultimately towards progress and success.

Until recently I thought progress in life towards your goals is about building enough positive habits that will each take you on autopilot to progress and success in things that you find important. In other words, building systems of success. It's a bit like building dividend streams that will lead you to wealth - here then, I'm talking building smart streams of little habits that will make you a stronger, faster, better person. Habitual progression. I still stand by this but recently I came across a blog entry that has added to my understanding of the path to success - there was another path I had not been thinking about. More on this in a future post.