Whatever your personal goals may be — getting in shape, learning a new skill or finishing a big project — you’ve probably realised that it’s not easy. Whenever we push the boundaries of our abilities we must battle fear, frustration, self-doubt and a hundred other obstacles. It can get pretty brutal. The temptation to give up can be strong.

However, there are ways to stack the odds in your favour. In this post we’ll look at some habits and techniques of high performers and how you can use them to achieve your goals. See it as a personal armoury or utility belt you can use to ensure that when the going gets though, you’ll just keep on going.

Some of the things I’ll cover:

The productivity hack Jerry Seinfeld used to become one of the world’s most popular comedians.

The one trait that matters most for achieving personal goals.

trait that matters most for achieving personal goals. How the American Nazi Party can help you lose weight.

Sounds interesting? Let’s get started!

The One Factor Essential For Success

What is the key to success? Most people would say it’s a combination of different factors — being born with the right genes, being raised in the right environment or knowing the right people.

However, when researchers studied graduates from the West Point Military Academy — one of the toughest military academies in the US, whose alumni include presidents, generals and NASA astronauts — they found something surprising.

The West Point study concluded that there was one single trait that was much more important for a student’s success than any other talent, resource or skill. The trait was grit, which is defined as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals”. More so than any other factor usually associated with success, such as intelligence, knowledge or charisma, grit seemed to be a reliable predictor of success.

Simply put, the students who managed to graduate from West Point were the ones determined not to give up:

“Grit entails working strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress … Whereas disappointment or boredom signals to others that it is time to change trajectory and cut losses, the gritty individual stays the course.”

The researchers also found something else: While some people seem to naturally have more grit than others, grit works like a muscle — it can be trained. Every time you choose to delay gratification your “grit muscle” becomes stronger, up to the point where perseverance becomes easy, even automatic.

You don’t have to go through Navy SEAL training or trek through the Himalayas to improve your grit — you can work at it bit by bit, and it takes very little effort to do so. In the following sections we’ll explore how to turn grit into a habit.

Consistency

“Long term consistency beats short term intensity” — Bruce Lee

As the grit study showed, success belongs to those who keep showing up. To reach your personal goals you must be consistent. However, this is easier said than done.

Most of us are probably familiar with the fact that motivation ebbs and flows, and that it’s usually conspicuously absent when we need it the most. So, if we want to ensure consistency, sitting around waiting for motivation or inspiration to happen isn’t going to cut it.

This is why grit is so important — when it comes to consistency, discipline beats motivation any day of the week. However, as good as they may be, grit and discipline are not perfect. First of all, some of us are just pathological quitters — until we’ve built up our grit muscles we need an interim solution that will keep us on track.

Furthermore, research has shown that discipline is a finite resource — every time you have to make a decision between short-term and long-term gratification you use up a bit of your discipline reservoir. If you managed to fight off the temptation of picking up that cookie at the cafeteria you might be powerless to resist the urge for a Netflix binge when you come home.

Faced with the decision of pressing on or giving up, even the most disciplined of us might falter. But what if there was a way to short-circuit the decision-making process altogether? What if we could somehow put discipline and consistency on autopilot? Enter the habit.

The Power of Habit

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” — Will Durant

I’ve always hated waking up early — ever since my teenage years I’ve been a pathologically late riser. However, waking up one morning I noticed a drastic change in my behavior: Instead of wanting to roll over and go back to sleep, I jumped out of bed, tiptoed into the kitchen as not to wake up my wife, and put on a pot of coffee. I looked at the clock on the microwave, its red figures growing bright in the darkness — it said 06:00 AM. The experiment had worked.

When studying the writing process of successful authors I found that most of them had one thing in common: They were creatures of habit. While working on a new book most of them would create a carefully designed set of routines: Get up in the morning, eat breakfast, sit down to write, take scheduled breaks and then repeat the next day.

While writing they would — literally or figuratively — shut themselves off from the outside world completely to ensure that no outside stimuli would perturb their routine. One famous Swedish author went so far as to pour his evening liquor with a measuring cup, making sure he would consume the exact same amount of alcohol every day.

Finishing a novel is no mean feat, yet these authors seemed to consistently be able to pull it off. I started wondering, could there be something to the way they had structured their days to revolve around a repeating set of habits? Was it their habits that held the key to success?

In The Power of Habit Charles Duhigg describes a habit as consisting of three components:

Cue — an external signal that tells our brain to trigger the habit.

— an external signal that tells our brain to trigger the habit. Routine — a set of physical or mental actions that the brain starts carrying out automatically

— a set of physical or mental actions that the brain starts carrying out automatically Reward — a positive outcome that reinforces the habit.

Eventually, the brain starts associating the cue with the reward. The more we run through this “habit loop” the stronger the association becomes, until exposure to the cue immediately triggers a strong craving for the reward.

As an experiment, I decided to attempt overriding my habit of sleeping in with the habit of getting up early. Being a coffee lover, I bought a french press and decided that every morning that I managed to get up on time I would make myself an extra nice cup of coffee. I kept doing this for a few days, and eventually I stopped thinking about how tired I was —my mind was too preoccupied with the thought of that cup of fresh, french press coffee.

Design Your Habit

Let’s walk through Stephen Duhigg’s recipe for creating a habit:

The first part is the cue — for my “wake up early” habit the cue was simply my alarm going off in the morning. However, you can create cues in many different ways:

Placing a specific item, like your jogging shoes, in a place where they’re clearly visible.

Setting an alarm for a specific time of day.

“Anchoring” the new habit to an existing habit, for example: “I will do ten push-ups every time I finish brushing my teeth”

Second, pick your routine. I would recommend starting small. I mean really small. No, smaller than that. It has to be something that you couldn’t possibly fail at. If you want to start flossing, for example, habit expert BJ Fogg recommends starting with just one tooth.

The reason for setting modest goals is to guarantee you a lot of early wins —the important part is to make it a habit, not getting quick results. Build the habit first and the results will come eventually. As Brooklyn 99 star Terry Crews said about working out:

“Go to the gym, don’t even work out. Just GO. Because the habit of going to the gym is more important than the work out.”

So, for the first thirty days, make it your goal to just show up.

After you’ve successfully performed your routine, feel free to reward yourself. Coffee was my reward, but if you don’t like coffee here are some other suggestions:

Have a snack, if that’s compatible with your dietary goals.

Take a photo of yourself performing the habit. Build a photo journal or just brag to your friends.

Put away a small amount of money into a “splurge fund” which you’re free to spend on anything you want.

Wake Up Early

I would recommend working on your habit first thing in the morning, especially if you’re a busy person. Set your alarm a bit earlier (30–90 minutes) than usual, grab a coffee and get to work.

Even if you’re a full-time employee, college student or parent you should be able to get to bed at least half an hour earlier, so you can get up earlier without cutting into your sleep.

Some good reasons to wake up early:

Minimal risk of outside events disturbing your routine. This includes phone calls, e-mail, pets and family members, but it also covers things that might happen during the day — what if you have to work overtime, get stuck in traffic on your way home or just end up getting too tired?

As discussed earlier, willpower is a finite resource. Your willpower reserves are replenished nightly, so when you get up in the morning your willpower is at full capacity.

Beating procrastination — the more you put off something the less likely that you’ll actually do it. Starting the day with being productive sets you up for being more productive during the rest of the day.

John Grisham wrote his first novel while working full-time at his law practice in Mississippi. Every morning he would wake up extra early to make sure he’d be at his office at 5 AM — two hours before his first clients came in. Then he would put on some coffee and start writing. It was a gruelling time for Grisham, who often had to fight to stay awake in court, but eventually he finished the book. Unless you’re the type who looks goods with bags under your eyes I wouldn’t suggest sacrificing that much sleep for writing, but it does show what’s possible with determination and a cup of strong coffee.

Jerry Seinfeld’s Productivity Secret

When amateur comedian Brad Isaac got a chance to meet Jerry Seinfeld, the first thing on his mind was to ask how to improve his standup act. Seinfeld’s answer bordered on the obvious:

“The way to be a better comic is to create better jokes. The way to create better jokes is to write every day”

However, the second part of his advice was much more interesting: To motivate himself to write every day he would purchase a big wall calendar. On days where he had written a new joke he would cross out the date with a big, red marker. Eventually, he would have a long chain of crosses — the only thing he needed to focus on was to not break the chain.

The ingenious thing about Seinfeld’s calendar technique is that it makes performing the habit into its own reward. Putting that big, red cross on the calendar gives you a real sense of accomplishment — it feels good. And the longer you keep going the less you want to break the chain. Another advantage is that it works for any daily habit, so if you can’t think of a suitable reward you can always fall back on using the calendar technique.

Another way to make sure you stick to your habits is to literally bet against yourself. On his quest to lose weight, author A.J. Jacobs decided he had to quit eating his favorite snack — dried mangoes. There was one problem, however — he really liked those dried mangoes. To help him drop his mango habit, Jacobs enlisted the help of an unlikely ally — The American Nazi Party.

Being the most noxious organisation he could think of, Jacobs wrote a big check to the Nazi Party and asked his wife to put it in the mail if she saw him eating another mango. The mere thought of her mailing that check was enough to ensure he never touched them again.

Don’t Give Up

For the Spartans, there were only two acceptable ways to return from battle: Carrying your shield if you were victorious, or being carried on your shield if you had died in battle. Returning without your shield was unacceptable — it implied you had thrown it away in order to flee.

Reaching your goals works very much the same way. You will have good days and bad days. You will have days when you feel motivated and days when you feel no motivation at all. There will be streaks of confidence and streaks of self-doubt. However, if you manage to ride through all that — the good times and the bad — you’ll eventually end up where you want to be.

Remember: The only way to fail is to quit. With that in mind, I’ll leave you with the words a Spartan mother would tell her son as she handed him his shield to go into battle: “Come back with it, or on it!”

Further Reading

Much of this post was inspired by Charles Duhigg’s excellent book The Power of Habit — if you want to know more about habits and how they affect us I definitely recommend you read it. The good news is you can get the audiobook for free on Audible if you sign up for a 30-day free trial.

Audible usually offers one free ebook for trial members, but since I’m an affiliate you actually get two free audiobooks.

Full disclosure: I will also earn a small commission when you sign up — however, I never recommend products I don’t believe in. If you don’t like Audible you can always cancel before the trial is over, and you get to keep the books!

Additional Resources

Ted Talk by BJ Fogg on the power of Tiny Habits

Angela Lee Duckworth on grit and success

Stickk is a service which lets you find a charity you hate, pledge an amount of money to them and set a goal — if you fail to meet your goal, Stickk will make sure your money ends up in the hands of people you despise.

Coach.me is a great app for holding you accountable and making sure you stick to your goals. Karen Cheng used it to help her learn to dance in a year