Ask ten high achievers what the most important success trait is, and you’ll likely get ten different answers. It’s a tricky question, because the most important and impactful trait to ensure your success may vary. It could be vision, planning, or goal setting early on in a particular venture. It might be persistence and drive once you determine what it is you want. Integrity and honesty might be the most important trait at the time of deal-making, partnership creation, or contract development. To say that there is a single most important success trait would difficult, and likely inaccurate, as there are many, and each come into play with varying importance at different times.
That being said, there is one trait that I have been thinking about this week. While listening to a podcast clip with the late Bob Proctor, a personal growth legend, I heard him being asked what he thought was the most important success trait. Without missing a beat, he said repetition. Repetition, the act of repeating something over and over, is surely one of the most critical ways to ensure success. It is an essential ingredient in becoming masterful at anything.
Another word we can associate with repetition is persistence, and when you commit to persistence, and repeatedly do something again and again, you form habits. And it’s our habits that ultimately not only lead to success or failure, but keep us in the state of success or failure.
Proctor said something that I have been pondering all week. He spoke of a speech given by Albert E. N. Gray, who worked for the Prudential Insurance Company of America, called “The Common Denominator of Success,” and was given back in 1940. The key line in that speech was this… “The common denominator of success – secret of success of every individual who has ever been successful – lies in the fact that he or she formed the habit of doing things that failures don’t like to do.”
The act of doing something over and over and over causes that thing to become a habit. We often think of habits in terms of the negative things people engage in… smoking, snacking late at night, looking at our phones, etc. These habits are extremely powerful because having done an act so many times, and doing it so often, it goes from being a conscious act that we have to think about, to one that gets moved to our subconscious mind, becoming something that we do automatically without having to give it any thought. It bypasses our conscious decision-making process all together.
As automatic and powerful as bad habits can become in our lives, so too can good habits. This is why committing to repeating positive and healthy behaviors is so critical. If we get past having to convince ourselves, or motivate ourselves, to make good choices, and make them habits, success becomes more consistent, and our positive behaviors become much, much easier.
After delivering that speech in 1940, Mr. Gray was approached by a man and asked how is it that successful people like to do the things that unsuccessful people don’t. Mr. Gray told him that they don’t like to do those things, which is why they make them habits.
Wow! What a revelation… most people don’t like to do the things that create success, so they make them habits, which takes away that grueling battle we have in our heads when deciding whether or not to do something that needs to get done.
We don’t love to brush our teeth every morning and evening. After all, it’s time consuming, not fun, and we’d easily skip it from time to time if we had to consciously decide to do it every day. But we do it because we’ve made it a habit. It doesn’t even make its way through our conscious mind. We just do it.
Start working out every morning, going for walks everyday after lunch, or only order salads when out for lunch. Do these things every day, and eventually they become habits. You’ll just do them. Focus on the good in the people around you, what you like about your job, or the positive things going on your life. Do this every day, and it will become a habit. You will eventually have a completely different attitude and disposition about life.
Writer Will Durant is credited with saying, “We are what we repeatedly do… therefore excellence is not an act, but a habit.” How true that is.
Start doing the things you know you must do, and do those things over and over and over again. Repeatedly do those things until you do not have to give thought to them. They will become habits. And once you start stringing more and more positive habits together, the greater your successes will become.
The most successful people don’t love doing things you don’t like doing, they simply do them enough, over and over, and turn those behaviors into habits, which not only makes those good behaviors look easy… they actually become easy.