The Most Important Trait That Leads To Success

Whether your aim is to get more dates, get fit or start your own business, the single most important trait you should strive to develop is consistency. Not only is consistency the key to success in every area of your life, but it is also one of the core elements of all entrepreneurial, sporting or artistic achievement.

First, let me set out precisely what I mean by consistency and what I don’t. The dictionary definition the word the way I’m using it is as follows:

A steadfast adherence to the same principles, course, form.

‘Principles, course, form’—results, you notice, are not mentioned. This is absolutely key. You need to be consistent in your actions. Results will follow, but in their own time. You can’t force them. Your focus should always be solely on putting in right action every day—that is, consistently carrying out the same actions in pursuit of a clearly defined end goal. What you shouldn’t do is try to jump straight to the goal itself. This is counterproductive, and any success you do achieve will be short term and illusory, built on flimsy foundations.

When men seek advice online it is often because they are unhappy with some element of their lives, frequently their success with women. Here they discover a community of guys who are interested in self-development and are actively working to improve themselves. Excited and inspired, the less consistent will join expensive gyms and hit them up for a month or so, or they go out and approach three or four women before giving up and returning to the comfort zone of their bedrooms. There, despondent, they will rationalize that self-development doesn’t work or isn’t for them, before sinking into a depression even more acute than before. This, of course, is fundamentally the wrong way to approach anything.

In part, this pattern is undoubtedly due to cultural influences. We are inundated with articles on how the internet has an adverse effect on our concentration spans. Whether or not you buy this is up to you (I’m personally ambivalent), but coupled with an emphasis on quick and easy fame and ‘success’ through reality TV and cheap celebrity, it is undeniable that the message is that you don’t have to work hard or consistently to achieve your goals. This, of course, is entirely false. In fact, the formula for success in any endeavor is as follows:

Consistency + momentum = success

And the good news? Consistency itself creates momentum. But you need to put the work in.

Let’s take meeting women as an example. If your aim is to improve your dating life then take a minute to work out how many women you have approached this week. Many, some, or none? Perhaps you alternate between a high number of approaches on the weekend, and none during the week. Or perhaps you steeled yourself to make that one big daygame approach and it went badly, so then you retreated into yourself, afraid to try again.

If you want to get really good with women, and achieve a lasting skill set, then you should make your habit consistent. Decide on a realistic number of girls you can speak to per week and stick to it.

When you operate with this mindset you will find that slowly, over time, you will see incremental gains. Some of your approaches will be horrible—you might say something stupid, or not open strongly enough, or whatever. It doesn’t matter—make a mental note and go on to the next one. You will start to feel great satisfaction knowing that you are working hard to better yourself, regardless of your results. This will strengthen your consistency. Over time you will see your interactions improve exponentially.

And time in the trenches is very important. Andrew Robinson, author of Sudden Genius? The Gradual Path to Creative Breakthroughs writes:

Psychologist John Hayes in 1989 [discovered a rule] soon endorsed by other psychologists . . . that a person must persevere with learning and practicing a craft or discipline for about 10 years before he or she can make a breakthrough. Remarkably few breakthroughs have been achieved in less than this time.

Einstein’s first insights into relativity were in 1895, ten years before his Theory was published in 1905. Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was written in 1912, a decade after his apprenticeship to Rimsky-Korsakov in 1902. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon appeared in 1907, ten years after he began training as an artist in Barcelona. This is not to suggest that it will take you ten years to get a date with a cute girl — far from it. But genuine mastery in any discipline takes real time, effort and application.

For a contemporary sporting example, look at the way Kobe Bryant trains. Kobe has won 5 NBA championships, 2 Olympic Gold Medals and he has a net worth of over $200 million. How did he attain this impressive level of success? Through consistent, focused practice. According to one trainer, he would begin conditioning work at 4:30am, run and sprint until 6am, lift weights from 6am – 7am and then make 800 jumps shots between 7am and 11am—all before official Team USA practice!

If this sound intimidating then that is entirely understandable, but realize at the same time that it is Kobe’s near-crazy work ethic and consistency that has put him where he is today. Don’t let stories about hard work put you off—if anything they should inspire you. Why? Because you can work hard too. Mark Cuban, billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks has this to say:

In sports, the only thing a player can truly control is effort. The same applies to business. The only thing any entrepreneur, salesperson or anyone in any position can control is their effort.

The same goes for meeting women, getting jacked in the gym, becoming a better writer or any other endeavor you can think of. And the way to maximize the effort you make is to consistently put in the right action on a daily basis.

Last year I wrote a novel. Every morning I would get up at 5am before work and write for 90 minutes before showering, putting on my suit and heading off to into the corporate wasteland. I would also write in the evening and at weekends. Some writing sessions were terrible. My prose would sound cliched, stilted and lifeless. No matter—I just kept tapping away at the keyboard, filling up pages with words. My only aim was to get to the end. Finally I finished. I read it back—I had a novel that contained some terrible passages, some okay passages and a few that I as very happy with. A long period of editing and rewriting fixed the flaws and, while it’s still work in progress, I now have a book that I’m proud of. But it didn’t happen overnight—it was born out daily work which created incremental improvements over a long period of time.

Visualize whatever it is you want to achieve then work out how you’re going to get there. Break the process down into small chunks and then do something every day that will get you a little closer to your goal. Don’t think too much about the endgame—simply congratulate yourself on taking action today. After a while you will find that you are building up momentum and that you are enjoying the process.

If you have a bad day then so what? Don’t sweat it. You’re doing this every day. There will be natural peaks and troughs. Tomorrow will be better. Keep going no matter what. In time you will see your technique improve. Perhaps your conversations with girls will last longer or you will start getting makeouts or phone numbers. These successes will spur you on and encourage you to take more action. You will enter a virtuous cycle. Most importantly, you will start to feel that true inner contentment and happiness that comes from working on getting good at something that is important to you, rather than the shallow, illusory happiness that is offered to us by modern culture.

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First published at ROK