Rob Dial runs two companies and a podcast that help people develop their talents, but he insists he doesn’t – nor does anybody else – have one key that will unlock success. It doesn’t exist.
“Success is not one big event that changes your life. Success comes from the accumulation of many small actions – what I call micro-actions – that you take every single day,” he writes in his book Level Up.
You have to see success as an accumulation of daily actions, pushing you out of your comfort zone. But most people decline to take action because of fear, which comes in four varieties: Fear of rejection, being told no or being turned down after making the effort; fear of success, and the change or backlash that might create; fear of being seen as a fraud or imposter; and fear of abandonment, that you will be adrift or alone, driving away those close to you.
In essence, it’s a fear the action you take will lead to failure. A brain left to its own devices will always go negative, he warns. But those fears are usually wrong-headed. He points to a study that 85 per cent of what we worry about never happens. And of the 15 per cent that did occur, 79 per cent of participants handled what occurred better than they expected. “True growth comes from feeling fear and deciding to do the thing you are afraid of anyway,” he says.
Write down a list of your fears, the emotional pain you’re anticipating in each case, how the fear is holding you back and how you can push past it. He recommends adopting what can be a positive, propelling counter-fear: Getting to the end of your life and wishing you had accomplished more.
Pushing past fear, routinely, allows you to be more consistent: Showing up each day, getting things done and improving. “Discipline doesn’t come from doing the things you want to do – it comes from doing the things you don’t want to do but know that you should do,” he stresses.
If you’re trying to build discipline, he notes, a good place is working at a job you hate. More generally, the hardest part of doing what we don’t want to is breaking the cycle of inaction and getting started. After recognizing what it is that needs to be done, he recommends counting to three and then just doing it. Train yourself not to negotiate with your mind. Act.
“The people who are the most successful are the ones who consistently try to do just a little bit more and be a little bit better. They push themselves past what is possible because there is always another level,” Mr. Dial writes.
Another trick he recommends is to get in the habit of finishing what you start, even the little things. And it’s not just at work – to build the habit, try it throughout your life. He found at the gym he was stopping short of his goals so now he does 1 per cent more each day than his objective – running a few seconds more on the treadmill, for example.
These little daily improvements and micro-habits won’t produce immediate results. But when compounded over 10 years, Mr. Dial insists they will change the trajectory of your life.
If you read 10 pages from a book today, for example, it won’t make you more intelligent; but over 10 years, if the average book is 300 pages, you will have read 120 books. Holding a 15-minute meeting with your team today won’t move the needle much but every day, month after month, he believes it will create a cohesive team at the top of their game.
Consistent micro-actions count.
Quick hits
- If you choose to build that reading micro-habit Mr. Dial recommends, here’s some additional direction from Farnam Street blogger Shane Parrish: “Reading a great book twice is more valuable than reading 10 average books.”
- If someone is repeating themselves, Allison Murphy, senior vice-president of operations at Axios media notes, it is because the matter is really important and/or they don’t think you’re hearing them. Show that you are with a phrase like this: “You’ve mentioned X a few times. Can you say more?”
- People expect Paul McCartney to play the 1968 song Hey Jude at his concerts and he often has because fans love it. Innovation consultant Greg Satell says doing the same thing over and over again can get boring, but if it’s working well, don’t try to be different for difference’s sake: “We need to learn to play our own personal Hey Jude’s.”
- Entrepreneur Seth Godin recommends following this advice famed author Ursula Le Guin had hung over her desk: “Is it true? Is it necessary or at least useful? Is it compassionate or at least unharmful?”
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.