Winners and losers have the same goals. So how to win in life?
So what is it that separates them?
Winners and losers have the same goals.
-Atomic Habits, James Clear.
The author rightfully says so, how “we concentrate on the people who end up winning—the survivors—and mistakenly assume that ambitious goals led to their success while overlooking all of the people who had the same objective but didn’t succeed.”
And this line holds meaning.
All winners and losers began with the same goal, the same dream, the same way. We all were standing at the beginning of that one path where we began. What differentiated the successful people from the unsuccessful people are the processes. The systems. The methods.
No one wants to fail. No one wants to lose.
The student failing the grade and the student securing the A, maybe both wanted to have the same thing. Only one achieved it. The other maybe just didn’t want to, or couldn’t put in the effort.
All athletes aim for the gold medal. So what it is that separates the one being the number one and the one not even in the top three? We know that it cannot be the differences in their goals or visions. Both wanted the same thing.
So there must’ve been something else affecting their level of success. There must be some other factor deciding who would achieve what. This factor is not just the hours they put in. Completing the ten thousand hour target can’t just get you anything you want from life. Not that easy, for sure.
It’s something much bigger, and something much finer than that.
It is the method. The mindset.
It is the calculation, the deliberate calculation of every second of work and training. It is the system.
This system is never flawless, it just rewards you according to how closer to perfection you are. Because you cannot be perfect. Why?
A Practical Approach—
One business firm has a higher turnover than some other business firm. For convenience, lets say that both started small, both started with young inexperienced entrepreneurs who had a seemingly impossible vision in mind.
None of them gave up.
Both of them planned to create a brand for themselves. Getting inspired by the name of Amazon, Google, Microsoft.
They wanted to create something epic, they wanted to leave behind a legacy.
Only one of them went through with it, though.
The question here is why?
Did luck have a hand in it? Absolutely not.
We all have our own rooms of luck, but there is a gatekeeper at the door and he only lets Luck out when he’s satisfied with your performance. This gatekeeper judges you day and night, getting to know everything about you, your tolerance, patience, hardworking capacity, how far are you going to go before you give up.
This gatekeeper keeps track of everything.
He looks for a few things while judging you.
The First Thing You Need:
First, he looks for hard work, how willing you are to perspire so you could achieve what you want, how many days and nights are you willing to put in for your motive. What are you choosing: studies or Netflix? Sleeping at 5 a.m. or getting up to do your work? Give up or keep going? What way are you choosing: the hard or the easy one? What’s the reason for your existence and what are you doing to fulfill it?
That’s hard work.
The gatekeeper notices it first.
The Second Thing You Need:
After hard work comes something the gatekeeper is not really looking for necessarily, but it’s something you’re bound to face.
Failure.
In your path to success and excellence, you are bound to face failure. It’s something that will happen. Maybe just once, if you’re lucky, maybe many times, if you need to learn a lesson.
Whatever the reason for your failure be, I feel they are really necessary to shape us as the highly energized, protein-shake-drinker human beings we are.
Failure helps us in multiple ways:
- Kills our ego before it even emerges.
- Makes us tough, makes us rough.
- Diversities challenge us. Failure gives a reality check of whether we’ll even be able to survive or not under pressure.
They test a human’s will, keen to figure out if the human even deserves what he or she’s going to get.
As they say, nothing can resist a human will that will stake its existence on its purpose.
Let failures make you grow.
Let failures try to bring you down to your worst, your absolute lowest. Let failure try to seize you, and fail.
The Third Thing That Is Necessary:
What follows failure, is resilience. Or, worded differently, what makes failure effective, is resilience. At least in those human beings who get the green signal on the gatekeeper’s test. After every failure, they get up.
They rise up, first on their knees (even if they have symptoms of arthritis), and they stand up. They try to catch their breaths, and then they say, “You can’t.”
Hey, World, listen here, you can’t, under any circumstances, make me give up. Because I can do this. I will do this. No matter how hard it is, no matter how long it takes, no matter how much I want to—I won’t stop until I get there.
This is resilience, springing back up from defeat. To have a go at your vision again.
This is the type of toughness the gatekeeper looks for in you. Show him what material you are.
Steel, yeah.
The Fourth and The Last Requirement:
The last thing you need is simple—and at the same time so freaking damn hard. It is consistency. Pretty self explanatory, yeah?
You work hard, you learn from mistakes, you don’t give up, and then you are required to not be disappointed or disheartened by anything and keep on working. You learnt from your failures and got the new action plan ready. Now work on that action plan. Be an improved version of yourself, and be consistent.
Althelets? Keep running, keep swimming, stay on the court, keep dreaming of yourself one day standing there. Then, for God’s sake, eat and get some sleep.
Entrepreneurs? Keep planning, keep designing, keep learning. Keep envisioning. Stay on your website, man. Get your brand logo. Get it together. Then get it out. Then get on the bed and sleep for the night.
Students? Keep studying. Keep revising. Keep waking up early and getting out of your bed while the whole world sleeps. Turn on the lamp. You wanna get into Harvard? You wanna get in the top ranking university? Go work for it. But don’t forget to take care of yourself first.
Dreamers? To all the dreamers? Keep on dreaming. Keep on working. Keep on achieving. Keep your dream alive. It has been and always will be bigger than all your excuses and insecurities combined.
All throughout this, don’t forget to have one thing in mind. Patience.
Be patient.
Something great lies at the end of that road. Wait. It will happen.
Just don’t confuse being patient with being static. Those are two completely different things and I would cover them up some other time.
Right now, however, just to give you a short brief of it—it doesn’t help just performing this routine of hard work, failure, resilience, and consistency just once.
That would prompt the gatekeeper to take your luck back from you and lock it in the door, and you would once again be ordinary.
You have to be hardworking, have to face and learn from failures, have to spring back up again. And not give in at all.
And then you have to do it all again.
This is how systems are built.
This is how legends are made.
And if we come to look at it, luck hasn’t got much role in it to play at all.
