Get almost anything you want by doing just two things

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Get almost anything you want by doing just two things

By John DeVries | February 9, 2008

We all want things, and most of us have at least a few goals in the back of our minds that we would like to reap the fruits of at some point in our lives. But why do we so often fail to make those desires real?

Honestly, I think mostly people fail to make the distinction between true belief and wishful thinking.

People who hope they will have or get something tend not to do much in the way or pursuing it. People who believe they can have something, will have something, and deserve to have it tend to act accordingly. The natural consequence when the second method is applied is usually success.

If you want something, you’ve simply have to apply two basic principals (one of which doesn’t even involve any energy expense on your part).

Principal 1 - Consistent effort

It amazes me how some people think they don’t actually have to make conscious choices and decisions that will bring them closer to what they want in life. Self-help literature is freaking packed full of the, “If you believe it and think about it a lot, you’ll make it real” mentality - fubar. I’m all about visualizing something, I have a healthy level of faith in the fruition of my dreams, and I spend lots of my time daydreaming and convincing myself that I can do just about anything. However, I also spend about 95% of my free-time aggressively pursuing the things I want out of life. Let me re-phrase, and apply that last sentence.

You need to spend a significant portion of your energy each day taking actions that will bring you closer to where you want to be. Consistent effort is quite obviously about two things - effort and consistency. Pretty deep hu?

Strangely enough, we do this all the time without even realizing it. Yet, when we have a goal or something we want to pursue, we just throw our lot in with hope. This is stupid.

Think about it. If you own a car, you probably made payments each month for years on end until it was yours. Consistent effort over time. And the result? You own a car.

If you finished high school or have a college degree you spent an exorbitant amount of time and energy doing homework, studying for tests, or at a bare minimum showing up to class enough to pass. Even if you barely graduated, you at least surrendered 6 hours a day, for the majority of 180 days in a year, for 4 years. What do you call that? Consistent effort. The result? You gradumitated. (did I?)

When you go on a vacation you patiently (or perhaps not so patiently) wait on the plane or in the car until you arrive at your destination. Are you seeing a pattern here?

We take all of this stuff for granted. Vacations aren’t instantaneous, property and auto ownership aren’t instantaneous, and education isn’t instantaneous. So why the heck should anything else you want happen overnight? The truth is, it doesn’t. But somewhere along the line we often get it in our minds that losing weight, finding the right relationship, having a fulfilling career, building muscle, and running long distances should happen right away. And when it doesn’t, we quit.

Listen, if you want something you must apply consistent effort. You must do all the things you can do to get where you want to go, and you must do them very regularly. In fact, you must fail regularly.

Failure is an integral part of “consistent effort”

Why do we accept our failures in the small things in life, writing them off as learning experiences, and then beat ourselves to death when we don’t succeed at our more complicated endeavours?

I recently read, “Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart” by Gordon Livingston, a psychiatrist who decided to put “30 true things you need to know” in a book. I thought it was an excellent book, I intend to write a review about it in the near future.

Anyway, he brings up an extremely valid point. If we begin taking golf lessons, karate lessons, skiing lessons, or singing lessons, we expect that it will take some time to acquire even modest amounts of proficiency with this new skill. We figure falling while skiing, getting punched in the face a few times while sparring, and yelling “FORE!!” a couple times, because we can’t hit a golf ball worth beans, is pretty much par for the course (wow, my grandpa would be proud of that joke). We accept that we will fail both regularly, and often while doing the things we are not experienced in.

However, we do not accept the same outcome in our life experiences. We beat ourselves up over failed relationships, poor self-discipline, bad eating habits, and lack of vocational direction (just to name a few) even though none of us have ANY experience when we begin trying out life (something we do pretty much until we die). This is ridiculous.

When you first learn to wake board, you’ll spend the vast majority of your time in the water, not on top of it. When you learn to ride a bike, you fall… often.

So let me make this clear, “consistent effort” does not mean “successful effort”. Gandhi, in his quest for sexual abstinence (not a goal of mine!) said, “All these efforts did not seem to bear much fruit, but when I look back upon the past I feel that the final resolution was the cumulative effect of those unsuccessful strivings.”

In other words, he failed enough, for long enough, in order to succeed.

Got a few bad relationships, horrible jobs, failed diets, or poor performances under your belt? EXCELLENT! You’re getting closer to success. The trick is not to quit. Remember, consistent effort. But please, don’t just do the same thing over and over. Fail, learn what you did wrong and then reapply yourself. Doing something that doesn’t work consistently for years on end is idiocy. Change it up to figure out what does bring results.

Principal 2 - Time

The good news is that if you apply consistent effort over time, you will succeed eventually. What people often consider bad news, is that it will probably take a fair amount time to get there. In fact, it might take many long months, years, or even decades to get what you want. Heck, it might require an entire lifetime of effort.

The people who get what they want out of life are the ones who are willing to pay this price. Applying consistent effort over the span of large amounts of time takes courage, discipline, unyielding perseverance, belief and determination. I think the reason for this is that most of that effort consists of failures. I’m sure any pro bodybuilder could describe hundreds of bad workouts, poor diet days and injury setbacks. But over the course of many years they succeeded as a result of those failures, not in spite of them.

Playing the waiting game is easier though if you work at something consistently. You will see some results, and each setback will often be offset by small successes. I see this occur in my physical goals, my spiritual goals, my social goals, and my relationships goals. It’s just a part of life. The saying, “Two steps forward, one step back” really applies here. That’s just the gig, so learn to deal with it.

Being patient with the process helps, but being convinced that you will succeed helps even more. You will have days where you doubt your ability to follow your dreams. It happens, accept it. But choose to believe in your goal the vast majority of the time. This is what will carry you through.

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