The success pattern

When I look at successful people in my life I always see certain patterns. The patterns seem to point to areas that are similar from successful person to successful person.

But many people are just struggling to meet the basics of their life. They want to improve their health or their career. They want to improve their financial standing in life or they want to have more quality time with family.

How I see this is that most people are not looking to be ultra-successful. They want meaning in life. They want prosperity. They want good health.

Unfortunately though, many people don’t understand the control that they have over these factors. They don’t take 100% responsibility and therefore fall short in several of these areas.

But success is something that we can work on and improve. It isn’t fixed. We aren’t simply successful or unsuccessful at birth and must deal with it throughout life.

This means that we can learn how to be more successful in any given area.

In the book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams, the author says, “There’s one more pattern I see in successful people: They treat success as a learnable skill. That means they figure out what they need and they go and get it.”

When it comes to something that you want out of life, do you take the same approach? Do you approach it with a curiosity to learn how to improve in that area and then work hard to acquire the right knowledge and behaviors to help you succeed?

With the systems and habits approach to improvement, we learn that we often have to start small and slowly build up the right actions. We don’t start with running a marathon we start by jogging regularly. But by doing this we can start to grow and improve and stick with it long enough to form new habits, which can then translate to these higher goals in the future.

This goes hand-in-hand with learning. As we learn more, we put it into practice. As we form more the right routines we can then learn beyond the basics. As we learn beyond the basics we can apply those skills to our systems and habits.

Patterns are an important part of life. They clue us in to certain things and help us see meaning. We can start to use the patterns to better understand underlying systems and structures. These are powerful, yet without pattern recognition we rarely see them.

If you want to improve in some area of your life, start by getting curious and learning more about that area. Then work to apply some of what you learn. Do it in a small, controlled way and then look to keep doing that until it becomes habit.

As you do this it will start you on your journey and you will start forming the thoughts and actions needed to succeed. As you work to learn more and more you can apply what you learn because you already have the framework down.

This helps avoid analysis paralysis. Instead of getting so much information before you even start that it becomes difficult to start, you will start small and as you gain more information you will already be on your way.