The Road to Success Always Goes Through This

Too many people focus on the destination. It’s fun to think about graduation instead of the four years of grind. It’s cooler to pontificate on the success you want rather than to plan the process. The road to success is the path you take to get to your destination. It replicates the process. When you focus on the process, you have a much better chance of success. The process is the day to day details and the system you ride on to move forward. The reason coaches like Nick Saban always have good teams Is because they have a system for being great. Your habits are the fabric that makes up your process.

Why The Process Matters 

Have you ever known someone that just is always successful? It seems like everything they touch turns to gold. The reason they have success is not that they are lucky, its because they follow a great process. Let’s look at two scenarios.

Student A

• Does homework for at least 1 hour every night
• Reviews what he learned at school for 1 hour
• Reads a book of his choice for 30 minutes
• Always takes breaks for 15
• Eats a healthy snack and does a 5-minute jog to keep the blood flowing
• Stays after school every Tuesday to meet with two teachers and get extra help

Student B

• Does homework once there is enough built up
• Never reviews work
• Never gets extra help
• Refuses to read any extra
• Tires to work without breaks to get done faster
• Eats unhealthy snacks
• Does not work out or move

Which student do you think is going to be more successful in the long run? I would take student A every time. Here is why. Student B could get better grades than student A and yet I would still ride with student A. The reason is that the first student is operating off of a system even if the system is not working however the fact that they have one means they know how to tweak it and try something new.

Once a system works and is repeated, it becomes a habit, and that is where things get really good.

The Road to Success Demands Great Habits 

If you repeat an excellent process, it eventually becomes a habit. As an Olympic sprinter, It became a habit for me to take care of my body every day after practice. I would ice bath, stretch, foam roll, get treatment, eat well, and get 9-10 hours of sleep. All of these things allowed me to keep training at a high level.

I did not need to think of doing these things though, because they were automatic behaviors. When your process becomes a habit it becomes dangerous because doing what will make sure you win is automatic. That is so powerful!

Some people need to force themselves to read or study, for you its second nature. You do it every day, and you feel weird if you don’t do it! Every habit comes with a craving you crave the reward and the feeling from accomplishing that task/

You will rarely see someone who has a lot of poor habits and is very successful. It takes too much mental energy to have to think about what to do every day. Your road to success will be much smoother if everything is just in auto mode.

As Your Travel Your Road to Success, The Habits Add Up 

Habits are sneaky. Whether you have positive habits or negative ones, they creep on tou over a long period of time. When you see someone who is overweight or behind on their bills, it never is just because of one event. It’s always the result of a bunch of small mistakes that went unnoticed. It’s the result of a bunch of small losses that you did not count. The opposite is true for success.

The person who reads for 15 minutes daily may not think it’s a big deal because 15 minutes after one day is nothing. But when you read 15 minutes for 10 years that adds up to over 50,000 minutes. That is a lot of reading, learning, and books that you can get through in that much time.

Your road to success is about building positive habits. Your positive habits will give you exponential wins that you can’t even imagine. You keep making those small dots on a piece of paper, and eventually, they add up to be something magnificent.

How Do You Build These Habits for Your Road to Success?

You do it using a method called Habit Stack. It’s the easiest method for building new habits because it does not depend on external cues. The process looks like this.

1. Cue
2. Craving
3. Action
4. Reward

The cue is something that happens that makes you start to crave a reward. The action is most considered the actual habit, and the reward is what you get to satisfy the craving. Here is an example of when you get to work each day.

1. Cue – Smells doughnuts at work
2. Craving – Begins salivating over the taste of one
3. Action – Eats doughnuts
4. Rewards – Tastes sugar and you feel satisfied

Habit stacking uses the cue as another habit. So you build your entire stack off of one good habit. We teach you to use waking up as the one good habit. The reason is that it’s the easiest to depend on and be consistent with. You don’t have to get up super early, but it does help.

Our system looks like this.

1. Stack
2. Start
3. Schedule
4. Show up

The first thing you need to do is decide what habits would be key for building your process. I will give you 5 important ones that I use as an example.

• Wake up at 3:10 AM
• Workout
• Complete the most important task
• Read for 20 minutes
• Meditate
• Complete brain training exercises for the day

Once I know what my habit stack will consist of, I start by waking up and getting into it. The key here is that you wake up the cue to go right into your first habit. You start your day at the same time and the same way every single time.

Scheduling is about blocking time. I block my first four hours of the day, but as little as 30 minutes will work. In the time you have blocked, you try and get through as many of your habits as possible. There is no rushing through. The purpose of blocking your schedule is so that you and everyone else knows that this is habit time.

Show up is the most important part of the process. Your road to success goes nowhere if you don’t show up. Everyone wants to be rich, but no one wants to show up and grind every single day.

Eventually, You Go from The road to Success to The Destination