Life is repetitive
Very repetitive. You eat breakfast probably hundreds of times a year, drink coffee every day, go to the bathroom over and over again. This is probably the thousandth blog post you've read in your lifetime.
It can feel mundane, a million miles from the life you dream of, as you sit in traffic (again), listen to the same music you are streaming from your phone, on your way to grind out another 8 hour shift at the same job, to pay the same taxes and be left with the same money at the end of the month.
Cheer up Richard
OK so just because things go over and over again, doesn't necessarily make it boring. That is all about your perspective on things.
The important take-away from this is that everything is process-driven. The devil is in the detail, as they say.
Habits
If you read the excellent book "Atomic Habits", you will maybe (quite brilliantly) get the same insight that I did. How fortunate you are to be told what to think instead of reading the book yourself and making up your own mind. What a time saver!
Essentially a habit is actually a solution to a problem. Hungry after work, not much time, want something cheap? Maccas it is then!
This is why I never believe people when they tell me they only do something "occasionally" or it's "just this one time". Sorry but you face the same damn problems every week of the year, so if you have a solution to that problem you're going to use it many, many times.
People are, as they say, creatures of habit.
What makes life hard
The challenge in all of this, is time. Time delays introduce confusion, as there is not a simple connection between cause and effect.
For example, you can go drink driving quite successfully many times (let me be clear, I am NOT recommending that), until of course that one time it doesn't work and you wrap your car around a lamp-post or end an innocent person's life.
You can do bad things and get good results, in the same way you can do good things and get bad results. That first week in the gym is not going to immediately pack on 4kg of lean muscle. Things are not neatly correlated and it's not easy to see what inputs lead to the outcomes you want.
For a deep-dive on this topic, there is a most savoury book on this subject - "Thinking in Bets". Luckily for you, I'm here to tell you what to think again, so rest easy my friend, no more responsibility for you!
But in essence, you need large sample sizes to iron out the luck factor - my days pricing insurance taught me that. If a random person tried to buy car insurance, I could not tell you whether they would crash or not, or how much it would cost to replace their car.
BUT, if 200 people similar to them asked for car insurance, I could tell you how many of them would crash (with a scary level of accuracy), and what the average cost of those crashes would be. Once you get into larger data sets patterns emerge, truth pokes it's head above the misty fog of uncertainty, and the law of large numbers reigns supreme. All hail.
Imagination
So to win at life, you have to be a kind of scientist / statistician (maybe not the answer you were looking for).
You have what business folk call "leading indicators" and "lagging indicators", or what I just call "inputs" and "outputs". Let's go through some examples. I always like to use health and fitness because it's usually very easy for people to imagine what I'm talking about.
Let's say I have a goal to get a bit leaner and put on a bit of muscle (who doesn't?). Those are my outputs - probably weight, body fat percentage, size of biceps, how often women swoon when the arm of my t-shirt slides over my bulging deltiods as I reach for something above my head.
But what are the inputs? Probably (I assume), what I eat, how much I exercise and maybe how many fitness videos I watch on YouTube.
See I have to start with some kind of guess as to what the mechanics of this situation are. I have a goal, some outcomes I want, and I have to guess at what inputs are likely to lead to that. Now, I have to realise at this point, I could be TOTALLY WRONG ABOUT THAT. This is the whole point of being a scientist. You are here to learn.
Measurement
So then I need to measure my inputs, and measure my outputs. In theory at least, if I can maximise (or minimise) the right inputs, then that should drive my outcomes. I.e. if I can increase the amount of exercise I'm doing each week, and decrease the amount of calories, and increase the hours I spend consuming fitness content, then hopefully I should see the results I want.
This is where the time factor creeps in, because it's not like I can just smash out 40 hours in a gym the first week, not eat anything and get to my destination. I will, sadly, have to be a bit more patient than that.
It could take 8-12 weeks just to start seeing if I'm going in the right direction, then much more than that to get to where I'm trying to go.
So it can take some time to reorganise your life just to get those input numbers higher. You have to break old habits (which are solving problems) and find new solutions to those same problems. Now when you are hungry after work and need a quick snack that is not expensive, you need to eat that nut bar you made yourself the weekend before instead of a box of McNuggets.
But that's time you used to use for something else, so now you have to find a solution to that problem and so on. The cascading effects of making changes in your habits will reverberate around your life more than the guitar on a 1970s Reggae Album.
And all this, just to FIND OUT if making all these changes to your habits is even going to move the dial on the outputs you want.
It could take you six months to realise that more hours of watching YouTube has very little bearing on your fitness goals. It make take you even longer to realise that sleep is a very important factor. You might read a bogus article that testosterone enhancing herbs can get your there faster, only to waste hundreds of dollars on snake-oil.
Why life is hard
So it is this uncertainty which makes life difficult. It would be easy if everyone had a ready made recipe. A guarantee that doing certain things would always lead to the outcomes you want. But there isn't. Looking at successful people can help, and doing research and things like that can give you ideas, but if you want truth, you have to TEST THEM, yourself. People lie, and charlatans peddling short-cuts are to be found everywhere. Preying like vultures on those too weak and impatient to discover truth for themselves.
If you are unwilling to find out for yourself, you will always be a slave to those who can convince you there is an easier way. Sometimes there is, there is often a better way, but for each better way there are scores of people with phony short-cuts trying to make a quick buck for themselves.
You only have to look at the body-building industry, for the legions of "natural" body-builders, who claim that it is this pre-workout shake or this test-boosting supplement or whatever, is what led to their massive gains. When the reality is they are keeping several mid-sized pharmacies in business with the amount of gear they are on.
Summary
So in summary, my fool-proof method to winning at life is:
- Figure out what you want (outcomes)
- Make a guess at what inputs you CAN control, that might lead to that
- Start producing the inputs
- Measure your inputs and outputs over time
- Learn from people who have achieved the results you want
- TEST what those people claim and see FOR YOURSELF if there is a cause and effect relationship between those things
- Slowly re-form your habits over time as you solve the new problems that emerge from your new way of life
- Try and enjoy yourself, you will make lots of mistakes so get over it
Once you have figured out which inputs lead to which outputs, then the game is simply to produce more inputs and harvest the outputs.
So there is a discovery process where you are learning, then there is the execution and discipline phase where you have the consistency to keep the numbers up.
Word of warning
There is a gotcha here, which is some things have thresholds and only work at a certain scale. Sales is a good example. If you make 1 sales call per week, you are not going to collect enough data to find out anything. Sales and marketing is typically quite high-volume, and often making just 1 sale will require hundreds if not thousands of solicitations. So at a rate of 1 per week would take decades of plugging away to see results. Most people would quit before then, and erroneously conclude that making sales calls does not work.
Similarly with relationships, there are sometimes thresholds to be met that you cannot drop below. Telling your wife you love her once a decade is not going to cut it. That doesn't make saying it incorrect, you just got the scale of the problem wrong.
So quotas matter and some things just don't kick in until you are giving it a concerted effort. Be warned.