You won’t be successful overnight. (Unless it’s 2,745 overnights later)

Certainly you’re smart enough and talented enough to get it right the first time.  And with the right amount of luck, you might just make it happen.

The odds aren’t in your favor though.

More than not, you’ll try really hard and maybe even “want it” really bad and still end up on the losing end of the equation.

It’s no wonder that being successful is the subject of countless books, articles, and self-help seminars.  It’s hard to do.  And yet, in spite of all the training around writing the perfect business plan or how to generate the most profitable sales, we seem to lack interest in most guaranteed way to realized outrageous success:

Continuous Progress.

The concept is not ground-breaking in originality and certainly not trendy enough to be a part of anything in Harvard Business Review.  But it’s exactly the formula you need to realize your dreams. Let me be clear about this:

The only thing standing between you and outrageous success is continuous progress.

Here’s why you need to focus on it:

1. Time clarifies perspective

You’re biased.  Could be all your experiences to date or what you are going through right now.  Believe it or not, the last 24 hours of your life have a lot to do with how you feel about your goals.  Your potential.  Your stamina.  The guts you need to summon to get past the pain to become a success.  It all changes pretty quickly.

A day from now, what you know and how you feel will be completely different.  By making progress every day regardless of how you feel, you learn to look past the pain and fear of the moment and just “take another step”.  Over time you get a better perspective.  You realize that your emotions are less important than you doing something.

2. Iteration builds momentum

Getting things done fuels your sense of purpose.  And that sense of purpose and self worth is what powers your ability to accelerate through the obstacles and toward your goal.

Learning through the journey is the real destination.  By leveraging small (but continuous) progress, you iterate through a series of meaningful steps toward what would otherwise be an unattainable goal.

3. Practice compensates for failure

You’re not going to get it all right at first.  Success isn’t a day in time and neither is failure.  Failure is just another practice round.  And that’s not just me blowing hot air at you.

We don’t think our 5 year old toddler is a failure when he can’t play Mozart’s Symphony #41 in C Major the first time they try.  For some reason we understand that it takes thousands of hours of deliberate practice to play a concert level concerto.  But then we get frustrated when we can’t master our wildest dreams in a single six week spurt.

Practice is the secret.

4. Movement trumps lurching

Stopping and starting causes massive amounts of damage — emotional and physical. Steady progress is the key to success.

Any of us can do an “all-nighter” now or then.  Maybe even do 50-60 straight hours on a single project.  But it comes at a cost.  You won’t ultimately find outrageous success.

Your behavior destroys anything depending on you.  Continuous progress is a kinder (more impactful) way to leverage the support of those around you as you try to move closer to your goal.

5. Passion builds investment

When you put enough into something, you work creatively to make sure you come out on the winning end of things.  When you jump into a quick “emotional fling”, you have so little invested that it’s easy to give up on yourself.

Your commitment to long-term success forces you to build a passionate investment in your success.  That investment is the antidote to the setbacks you can anticipate along the way.

6. Flexibility multiplies opportunity

Success pops up in all the wrong places.  Right?  You work outrageously hard; and just about the time you think you know what you want, success points you in a different direction.  Continuous progress allows you to adapt.

Instead of working non-stop through an obstacle that could redirect you to even bigger success, you are aware.  You are calm.  You are watching for the earliest signs of greatness.  And that flexibility leads you to find outrageous success.

7. Lasting yields differentiation

You’ve probably heard someone say that “showing up is half the battle”.  It’s more than that though.  It’s closer to 99% of the battle.  If you don’t have the guts (the stamina) to keep fighting for your goal, then you’ll ultimately end up losing.  You can’t help it.

Continuous progress is the ultimate way to stand out from everyone else.  You’re still around when everyone else has given up.  When they are gasping for air, you are pumping your legs and pushing for the finish line.

Get Moving.

You don’t have to do it all today.

You have the rest of your life to realize outrageous success.

You just need to get started…

It’s not a hard question.  Right?

It’s actually pretty simple.  Are you obsessed with being great?

It’s so simple in fact that many times that we confuse the real issue. 

It’s not the same as:

1. Being passionate,
2. Trying to be successful,
3. Working towards your goals, or
4. Improving on your talents.

It’s not the same.

I realized this a few weeks ago when I was running.  I was about 6.5 miles into a quick 14 or 15 mile run and ahead of me at the base of the hill about a quarter mile away was a bicyclist.  And for some neurotic reason I picked up the pace.  The hill sloped upwards for a little more than a mile so I knew I had some time to catch up (or so I thought).

About a half mile into this “race”, I had closed the gap quite a bit.  But the guy on the bike turned around and noticed that I was running up behind him and he picked up his pace.  He shifted up a gear or two and I noticed that he started pedaling harder (which ticked me off).  So I shifted into a higher gear.

For the next half mile we basically stayed at the same position, him pedaling faster, me running faster.  And then I pushed deeper.  I had to. The top of the hill was coming and I knew that I would lose my advantage.

By the time, we crested to the top of the hill, I was about 10 steps behind the bike.  Where, the guy looked back briefly and then started zooming off.  And so I did the only logical thing I could think of — I yelled at the guy – at the top of my lungs:  “Come back here…” (Which made the guy look back at the weirdo yelling at him and pedal away even faster.)

It’s a silly story.   But begins to illustrate the power of obsession.

1. Obsession is the greatness power in the world.

There really is nothing else like it.  Nothing as effective.

“Obsession is passion on curiosity steroids”

It’s not just about action or passion or intensity.  It’s about the effort and creativity to keep trying in spite of whatever comes along.

When you “want it” bad enough to keep trying in spite of past failures, you know that you are closer than ever to success.

2. Greatness isn’t a specific point in time.

It’s a part of who you are.  Greatness (however you define that that) isn’t a finish line.  It’s an attitude.  It’s a perspective.

You can’t do “greatness”.  That doesn’t make sense.

You are great.   And so what you do leads to amazing things.

Which leads me to ask you one thing: “What are you obsessed about?”

There is no shortcut to success.

Unlike every episode with Indiana Jones, there is no Holy Grail of aspirational whymsy whereby you plot a few strategic moves and end up with all the pieces on the board.

Success is a mindset.  Not a point in time…

Everything we ever been told about success usually revolves around a single point in time.

When we set a record, crash through the ribbon at the finish line, win the trophy, land the biggest customer in the history of our business…  It’s all about our “spot emotional index”.

Around key dates like graduation, end of the quarter, and bonus time, we feel successful IF there is a physical memento to indicate that we were successful.  Without the trophy it can be hard for us to gauge “success”…

That’s why I go back to the idea that success is less a date on the calendar and more of a philosophy.

It’s important that you adopt a successful mindset rather than aim for public indicators of success.

Flashy public indicators of success attached to a pile of debt leave you unable to to do the hard things that are required to realize your dreams.  You can either look like “the man” or turn your dreams into reality.  You can’t really have both…

Turning ideas into dreams and dreams into success is hard enough.  It’s a gut-wrenching, bloody nose battle.  It requires an absurdly special kind of toughness.

And when you are fighting for your dreams and the world is beating the life out of you you might be tempting to try to take a shortcut.

You find yourself asking, “Isn’t there an easier way?”

And why not?  Shortcuts look great on TV when Bo and Luke Duke take the dirt ramp up and over the washed out wooden bridge and beat the bad guys who want to shut down their moonshine business.

Real life though is a little different.  Shortcuts hurt you — not help you.

Here are a few key things to consider:

Taking shortcuts is you admitting failure up front.

It’s pretty mentally damaging.  If you really thought you could realize your dreams, you wouldn’t be tempted by the thought of taking shortcuts.  Admit it.  You’ve had the same doubts that I have had.  Can I do this?  Can I make this happen?  Do I have the guts to try one more time?

When your answer to these questions is a shortcut rather than focused intensity, you are admitting to yourself (and soon to others) that you are a failure.  You may throw out your chest and claim to be on top of your game.  But you know, deep down, that you have given up before you even started.

If you want to get your head back-on-straight look doubt in the eye and fight for your destiny.

• Get up two hours earlier.
• Call three more people and ask for help.
• Quit working on things that distract your focus.

Be intense!

Taking shortcuts is the wrong reaction to fear.

When faced with the audacious challenge of being successful, we find ourselves at the crossroads of fight or flight.  As soon as you decide you want to be something, you face resistance from the world.  That resistance turns into oppression — people actively fighting against your success.

It’s OK to be afraid.  But taking shortcuts is a flight reaction; not you fighting for your own success.  If you are running away from own success, it’s impossible to believe that you are taking steps to actually move you closer to your dreams.

Use fear to help drive effort and focus toward your mission.  Use fear to build mental muscle around your purpose in life.  Relish fear!  It is your nitrous on the raceway of life…

Taking shortcuts conflicts with the outrageous effort needed to be successful.

The inherent idea that you can realize your wildest dreams without a passionate investment of mind, body, and soul is just nutty.  You can’t get more from your life by doing less.

When you slow down and cheat yourself out of the self-investment necessary to build a brilliant destiny, you just won’t ever find yourself where you want to be.  To be successful, you have to work so hard your eyes have blisters.  Against all odds you have keep trying — when you’re sick, when you’re broke, when you have no fans.  It’s raw sweat equity.

Taking shortcuts conflicts with everything that outrageous effort leads to.  You do nothing that means anything and still get everything.

Taking shortcuts doesn’t mean you end up where you wanted to be.

Since there is rarely a certain, unchanging “end point” for success, you can’t take a shortcut to a destination that doesn’t exist.

Ever thought you really wanted something, only to change your mind once you see what you got?  You thought that you would be happy — and you weren’t.  Why?

Success is process — a mindset.  And while success includes milestones, the emphasis is on the journey not on the original destiny.  Most of us dream too small.  We take our destiny and shrink it down into a small container that the critics can’t get to.

Life has an amazing way of helping you realize your dreams in ways far from what you could have ever imagined at the beginning of your dream.  It’s bigger.  It’s better.  There’s no way to get there with a shortcut

So dream bigger than ever!

And don’t steal your chance at an amazing destiny by taking a shortcut.  It’s not fair to you…

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By the way, if don’t already have your complimentary ticket to the Edgy  Conversations Workshop, March 2nd, go get one!  Not taking shortcuts doesn’t mean you can’t work smart.  Space is limited.  I hope to see you on the call!