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1. Consistency
If there’s one thing we learnt from the tortoise and the hare, it’s probably that consistency is key.
You Can’t Control Luck, You Can’t Ensure Talent, but You Can Guarantee Hard Work.
Consistency is the single most important trait needed to get good at anything.
If luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity, then perhaps success is the intersection of hard work and consistency.
“The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.”
— Harry Golden
Growing up, I was never the smart kid that breezed through school studying 2 days before the exam.
I was more like the nerd that studied till 4am the entire term. (Which to think of it, might have killed more of my brain cells)
Perhaps I got hardworking because I was never smart.
“Keep going” is as difficult as “Just starting”
Along with Nike, we over-index on the importance of starting, but there is no point in starting if we keep stopping.
While it feels good to be the person that tries 10 new things, it is much harder to be the person that gets good at 1 thing.
My favourite quote is “everything worth doing is worth doing poorly”.
When choosing between quantity and quality, sometimes it might be better to (selectively) choose quantity.
I do my best to exercise 3–4 times a week, I first started exercising about a year ago and I ABSOLUTELY HATE IT.
*cries unhealthy tears of sweat*
BUT, I’d rather give my 5% and have a horrid exercise session than do nothing at all.
One might argue that there is no point in being consistent if you’re spending your time on the wrong things.
2. Clarity
Your vision is your destination.
To me, clarity refers to being purposeful. Thinking back to the times where I’ve been most sure of the decisions I’ve made, I’ve always had a clear “Why”.
Simon Sinek’s “Start with Why” was born from the idea of inspiring others, but sometimes we have to inspire ourselves first.
Understand Your Intentions — Ask Yourself 5 Whys
In sales, we are always taught to ask our clients 5 whys, to get to the root of a customer’s pain points.
Why do we have to ask the same question 5 times?
Because people have difficulty articulating their wants and needs.
When making decisions, I find it helpful to ask myself why questions to understand the way I am reacting or feeling.
It helps me to go through and vet my thought process and logical flow.
Instances where I’ve been trying to define my whys better:
- Why is it important to have a side hustle?
- Why does it matter if <> happens?
- Why do I spend my time writing medium articles?
I’ve also taken to actively questioning social norms to determine if the “typical” path is one for me.
It won’t always result in a groundbreaking realisation, but sometimes it helps you understand yourself better.
Having a clear understanding of why a project matters to me has also motivated me to work harder for it.
Define, Define, Define
The next step to achieving clarity is to understand how we wish to define what we want to do.
“Fail to plan and you’ll plan to fail”.
And what is a plan if not a way for us to think clearly?
The ability to define our targets and goals is essential to achieving success in anything.
Clarity of thought is extremely underrated in this world, as there seems to be a greater focus on quantity over quality.
Defining something doesn’t have to be a 10-page exercise, even a simple checklist would help guide your thinking in the right direction.
While the eventual aim of having clarity in life is a better decision-making process, please know that our expectations of the “best decision” should be reasonably bound by the limited information we currently have.
How many times have we heard, time is money?
Now more than ever we can agree that there is greater emphasis and competition on the ability to capture our time.
Curate Your Information Diet — Trim the Fat
Distractions are all around us. An average person bounces around from website to website, article to article, tiktok to tiktok.
The average person spends:
We spend A LOT of time-consuming information and media. How much of it is conscious?
A muscle we have to build in the age of information overload is the ability to apply focus only to the things that matter.
I do my best to build up a conscious habit of cutting out information sources I do not wish to spend my time on.
Every time I feel my mind wandering or the start of a Tiktok black hole, I ask myself, “Is my time best spent here?”
Unlock the State of Flow — Train Your Mental Focus
After cutting down the number of areas in our life we spend our time on, the next step would be sharpening our mental focus on the things that matter.
Concentration is one’s ability to focus energy on a single task for an extended duration.
I can bash through a pomodoro session of my to-do list, but I can’t seem to sit down and digest information as well as I used to.
Not sure about you, but it has been harder and harder for me to sit through a 30 minute video, or read 10 minutes of long-form content.
Facebook revealed that the average person spends 1.7 seconds on mobile content and 2.5 seconds on desktop content.
Absolutely horrible! Multi-tasking and social media have absolutely killed my attention span.
But our attention spans can be trained.
I’ve been forcing myself to:
- Adopt a 1 screen rule (No scrolling of Reddit while watching Netflix)
- Read books and jot down notes to synthesise information
- Take deep breaths in the middle of a hard task to center myself and go back to it
- Notice telltale signs of my mind wandering to ensure I stop it from happening
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