How To Make Success Inevitable

What if you could make achieving your goals inevitable? If you can understand some fundamentals about how the brain works, you can leverage that to make success an inevitable result of your actions. The best athletes, the wealthiest business women, and the most successful people are exceptional because they’ve mastered the fundamentals to the highest level of precision. If you learn the basic principle outlined in this post, you can achieve your success* too. If you practice this principle, you can make success inevitable.

*What does success mean to you? Success will mean something different to everyone, so when you are reading this, envision success as you define it. If you don’t know what your definition of success is, read this post on Creating Your Best Life first.

The single most important principle is consistency. First I will use psychology to explain why. Then I will explain how you can apply this knowledge to make success an inevitable side effect of your habits.

Why Consistency is Key

Have you ever heard the saying you are what you eat? It means that you are as healthy as the food you put into your body. Let’s apply this same principle to who you are. You are your thoughts, your feelings, and your actions. Furthermore, your thoughts, feelings, and actions stem from your sense of self – of who you believe you are, your identity.

The “default” setting is to believe you are whoever you’ve always been. The things that have happened to you in the past shape your thoughts, feelings, and actions. Your brain uses the knowledge you’ve gained from the past to apply in future situations. This is a survival instinct.

I don’t know about you, but I believe my future will be better than my past. I like to think positive and think better things will be coming my way. BUT there’s one major limitation I must overcome first. That limitation is the “default” brain setting of who I believe I am, as shaped by my past. The science shows that without making any changes, the past is destined to repeat itself.

How the Brain Works

Now I recognize that sentence sounds like something a fortune teller would say, so let me explain. If you’ve ever watched That’s So Raven, you know that when she has a vision for the future, usually a bad one, she attempts to prevent it. The ironic thing is that by attempting to prevent it, she causes the outcome to occur. While our “default” brain setting is designed to protect us, it may be the very thing that causes pain from the past to seep into the present and the future.

Even if you are actively trying to prevent something from your past from happening again in the future, as long as you believe that past is part of your identity, it will happen again. If you are hesitant to believe this is true, think back to something that happened in your past. Did it happen again? If it didn’t, did you change something to make sure it never would? If you can’t think of any of your own examples, we all have a friend who ran back to their ex over and over, no matter how toxic the relationship was.

Your brain creates an identity from your past experiences and your thoughts, feelings, and actions stem from that identity.

Now that you are aware this is how your brain works, you can actually use this to your advantage.

Using Brain Behavior to Make Success Inevitable

If you, like me, don’t want your future to be repeated versions of your past, you can create a new identity. In the previous exercise, you determined what you wanted your life to be like. Now I am asking you, who are you in that life? Is there anything you would start doing? Anything you would quit?

We’ve established your brain has this “identity” of you that dictates your thoughts, feelings, and actions. You can reverse engineer this process by changing your thoughts, feelings, and most importantly your actions to create a new identity.

For me personally, I wanted to be healthy, but I didn’t really think of myself as a healthy person. I have friends who are incredibly healthy, so I asked myself what they were doing that made them a healthy person. They exercised regularly and ate food that energized them. Since I wanted to be a healthy person too, I made the choice to exercise five times a week and eat well balanced meals daily.

If you asked me now, I would say I am a healthy person. I believe I am, and I know I am because healthy people exercise and eat well. Since I have decided that being a healthy person is important to me, it’s also been easier to make decisions. If you asked me now to grab food at McDonald’s, it would be easy for me to say no because I only want to put healthy food in my body.

Becoming the Person You Want To Be

You can do the same thing with any identity you want, whether it’s being an entrepreneur, a good friend, or an athlete. Determine what actions those types of people do and make a plan to start doing those actions too. If you do those actions consistently, you can shape your identity. Are you starting to see how this can make success inevitable? If you can repeat actions consistently, they will become habits, and then they can become your identity.

Consistent actions become habits. Habits become your identity.

I heard a story about a reporter that watched Kobe Bryant practice basketball during his peak. The reporter met him at 4am and he was already on the court, drenched with sweat. The reporter noticed this top basketball player was doing basic drills. Kobe said he had learned these drills in the fifth grade. The reporter was surprised he wasn’t doing anything more advanced. Kobe responded by saying, why do you think I am the best? He had mastered the fundamentals to the highest level of precision. He practiced the most basic actions consistently and with more dedication than most. With that level of consistency, success was inevitable, almost like a side effect of his habits.

You can do it to. Having the dedication to consistency is an exceptional characteristic all on its own.