Success is impossible without Habits

There are few things once acquired will guarantee success. In fact to be successful one must possess several qualities like patience, perseverance, consistency, hard work e.t.c. All these qualities applied together towards a specific goal always create success. Many have puzzled and searched for a shortcut to success but there really isn’t any. The closest thing to a cheat sheet for success is understanding and applying the power of habit formation.

According to Wikipedia, “Habit is a routine of behavior that is repeated regularly and tends to occur unconsciously”. So in other words, habit is very similar to a computer program as it helps repeat a particular task regularly. And a computer program can be written to perform any task the programmer desires.

Now imagine you are a computer and the programmer wants to program you to perform “success”. In actuality the human brain works like a computer and luckily we are also the programmer of our own computer. All we need understand is how to program ourselves. This isn’t rocket science as we have always programmed ourselves, many of us are just not aware of the process.

Everything we do from brushing our teeth to driving our cars are habits. The first few times we perform any tasks the brain creates neural pathways. The more we perform them, the more neural pathways to that specific task is created. This happens over and over again until enough is created to make that task a habit. Research shows that this takes an average of 66days depending on the task. In this state a task will be repeated regularly and unconsciously without requiring much thought and processing power from the brain.

All this tie back to success in that you can program your own success but understanding what kind of success you desire, what it takes to acquire it and the habits required to achieve it. Aristotle famous quote: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then is not an act but a habit” is a summary of this concept.

Once you can precisely replace negative old habits with purposefully engineered effective new habits, you will be free to live the life you have always imagined almost intuitively without much daily effort on your part.

The acclaimed former CEO of International Business Machines (IBM) once said: “if you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate”. To double your rate of failure, one must double their trial rate and this requires one to double their rate of change. If this process itself becomes a habit like it is to most successful people, this cycle happens almost automatically and without much thought.

Success in life is all about the application of principles and if the applications of principles can somehow be programmed into a habit in any individual’s life, this individual will notice an increased number of successfully endeavors in his/her lifetime.


For more info on Habits, grab a copy of “The Power of Habit”.

Olu Ogunlela

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