How To Succeed In Life? 7 Key Steps That Will Make You Successful!

How to succeed in life?

Growth, self-improvement, change: if you can do these consistently, then you succeed in life. But is there a formula for success? What are the keys to success?

All of the above are hard, especially, if you are looking for lasting success, enduring change.

We all know the theory: eat healthy, exercise, learn, and work smart. Unfortunately, human nature always takes the easy option. Do I watch my favorite show or trudge in the snow? Do I eat a chocolate-chip cookie or an apple? We all know what the right answers are, yet, time and again, we do the opposite.

How is my colleague so good at what he does at work? Why is my friend so slim? How does my neighbor manage to go the gym every evening? They are just like us – but they do and keep doing the right things – are they superhuman?

To have lasting success, we need to change, and to change for the better!

No doubt you have tried multiple times, but with limited success. New Year’s resolutions fall by the wayside by the time February rolls in.

Why is it so hard to do the things we know will make us better, will make us successful? How do I lead a purpose-driven life? How do I get back on track after not exercising for a week during vacation?

What I do know is willpower, motivation, discipline – these are good to have, even great to have! However, what I know for sure, if these are what my success hinges on, I can guarantee failure!

What then are the keys to success in life? This is where we turn to science and research.

Science to the rescue

Fortunately, many scientific disciplines provide the keys to success. Two, in particular, that we will regularly reference to guide our solution development are psychology and neuroscience.

Psychology is the scientific study of the mind and behavior.

It seeks to explain why we behave the way we do.

Understanding human psychology is the key to finding solutions that work, finding the formula for success in life. 

If we figure out why we do the things we do, what comes easy and naturally to us, we are much better positioned to determine the right formula for success in life.

We have all heard of motivation, will power, self-discipline, grit, growth mindset, and so forth – psychology helps us understand and use these by adopting the right tools and strategies.

More importantly, it also helps us understand how they may sabotage our success. Motivation fades, will power and self-discipline are unreliable, grit and growth mindset require retraining our brains.

Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system

The nervous system includes the brain, the spinal cord and the peripheral nervous system.

An important topic within neuroscience is neuroplasticity, and, more importantly, self-directed neuroplasticity –  the ability to purposefully and deliberately re-organize and re-wire the neural pathways in your brain throughout your life.

We can grow new neurons (neurogenesis) and build new connections between neurons (synaptogenesis) using tools and strategies like meditation, mindfulness, visualization and reflective self-inquiry.

If we know that we are capable of change (no matter our age or circumstance), and that other people have done this successfully, we too can leverage their tools and strategies. We can build a roadmap for our change and success in life. 

Like Anthony Hopkins tells Alec Baldwin in the movie, “The Edge”, “What one person can do, another can!“

What will make you succeed in life?

Our 7 step formula for success is described below. We start with the outline and expand each component with examples and the scientific underpinnings in subsequent detailed posts.

Knowing why a step or component works is often critical to incorporating and implementing the step in our solution – when we understand why something works, we have more faith in adopting it.

These 7 steps are the keys to success in life and all the things we want to achieve!

Step 1: Change your identity!

The first step towards success in life involves self-discovery: selecting an identity that models the success or change that you seek. To succeed, you have to change from the core: our innermost values / beliefs need to change, before the rest of you will.

Who do I need to become in order to succeed in life? If a change is to occur, if it is to be meaningful, the foundation must be solid – and the foundation, in this case, is “Who am I?“

I am healthy, I am fit, I am a blogger, I am a cloud architect, I am a systems day trader, I am slim – these are identities.

As of now, you may not yet be this identity, but you aspire to be a model identity eventually. Your transformation journey will eventually take you to that identity.

James Clear, in Atomic Habits, says “The key to building lasting habits is focusing on creating a new identity first.”

Identity-based habits are the foundation for lasting change.

Step 2: Define your new values

The new identity provides the vision, beliefs and values for change.

Once you have defined the identity or identities you desire, you need to ask what values and beliefs are held by this model identity? What does success look like for this identity?

Understanding the qualities a model identity must possess, sets the purpose for your change and moves you towards a purpose-driven life – the Why?

• A healthy person values nutritious food, values an active lifestyle, values mental calmness
• A fit person values exercise, values an active lifestyle
• A blogger values writing, values sharing
• A cloud architect values designing solutions appropriate for the cloud
• A systems trader values building automated trading systems
• A slim person values nutritious food

Step 3: What are you new goals?

A natural progression from the values and beliefs of the identity is towards the outcomes and goals that eventually lead to success in life for this identity.

What does it mean for the identity to be a success? What skills / knowledge should this person possess/acquire? What should this person aspire to?

• I am healthy = I weigh 145 lbs, my blood pressure is 110/70, my A1C is less than 5.7 and my total cholesterol is less than 190
• I am fit = I can do 10 chin ups, 25 pushups, run a mile in 5 minutes
• I am a blogger = I write a blog a week, my blogs show up in the top 5 google search results for specific topics, my traffic has a 1000 unique visitors a week, my blogs generate 5000 dollars a month from ad revenue
• I am a cloud architect = I know how to apply cloud concepts and services to build solutions, I can diagram and present my solutions clearly, I have broad knowledge of cloud patterns and services
• I am a systems trader = I can build systems that trade mechanically, I know profitable market patterns and behavior, I am familiar with crowd psychology

Step 4: Building systems for success

Vision and goals are abstract, long-term concepts: they provide a direction and guidance.

Many people define goals, New Year resolutions, targets to reach – but rarely do they plan and take action. Part of the problem is psychology – it takes motivation, willpower, discipline to move from goals to actions and sustain the actions till the goal is attained.

How many of us have set a goal of losing 20 pounds with the best of intentions on Jan 1st, only to see the goal slip away to the back burner by Feb 19th? That is because we are using the wrong tools and strategies.

The key is to design and implement success systems that force us to perform the small actions or steps that we need to take every day, and to leverage psychology to help us take these actions consistently – thereby, systematically progressing towards the goal.

If you focus on the journey, you keep getting better – the goals don’t even matter any more. You will reach the goal, and move beyond.

We build systems for success with:

• Habits (unconscious, automated steps)
• Routines (deliberate, effortful steps, regularly executed)
• Workflows (effortful steps for building skills and acquiring knowledge)

People who reach goals tend to do so by building systems for success.

When building systems for success, we need to understand psychology and neuroscience – they are the keys to success, for building effective systems for success in life.

Step 5. Perform the actions in your success system

We can design and build the best systems in the world. They are useless if we don’t execute these systems – consistently, day after day.

Humans don’t take to change kindly – once we are in our comfort zone, it is well nigh impossible to budge us.

The key, then, is to understand our weaknesses and to design systems that help us overcome them.

Research in psychology and neuroscience, especially in the areas of habit formation and maintenance, offer solutions that can help us retrain our minds to get into the habit of executing our systems.

Step 6. Track and measure your actions

A critical component of the overall system is tracking and measuring progress – in the form of actions / steps taken, and ensuring that progress is being made towards the goal. If progress is lacking, we need to review the system and ensure it is aligned with the goal.

Unless we review periodically, we will not be able to finetune and make the small adjustments necessary to ensure adequate progress.

For a review to be successful, we need data: we need to track and monitor what we do. We will explore tools and strategies from psychology, neuroscience and cognitive science to capture data systematically and review periodically.

Step 7: Adjust your systems for success

Course correction is often needed, especially when the progress is sub-optimal. Do we need better systems? Do we need to acquire new skills / competencies? Do we need to simplify to execute more consistently?

Life happens. No matter how rigorous our systems, we are not robots – emergencies occur, we get sick, we have bad days! Any system that is to succeed should incorporate strategies to recover from lapses, get back on track, and continue progress.

Here too, psychology has a bunch of strategies to leverage – but key is to understand why we fail and build in fail-safes.

If we understand human psychology, we realize we cannot rely on willpower, motivation, self-discipline – these cannot be trusted.

Your success has to be built on a different foundation, but again with help from psychology and neuroscience – because they also tell us what works!

Our 7 step formula is a blueprint for success

How to succeed in life? What makes us successful in life? How to change your life for better?

Personal Growth. Self-Development. Self-Improvement. Lasting Change. Enduring Transformation.

For any one who has tried to get better – these are common topics to explore. Unfortunately, these topics are vast, and often confusing. What we need is an actionable roadmap for success in life, a blueprint.

To succeed in life, we need to change, but change is hard!

In this series of posts, we present our 7 step formula for success – an actionable roadmap culled from the latest research. We condense the vast breadth of this information into a series of actionable steps.

These steps are grounded in psychology and neuroscience research that explains why these steps work, and why they are critical.

The first step, How To Change Your Life For Better? Change Your Identity (in 3 Steps)! deals with how we must change our identity for growth or change or success.

Subtle ways in which we express ourselves or view ourselves often has a profound impact on what we do and how we act!

Then, in How To Be Successful In Life? Align Systems With Goals! we introduced systems and systems thinking and showed how they complement goals: goals set the direction, systems provide the progress.

The second part, then, involves building systems tuned for success, aligned with our goals. In Why Systems Thinking Will Make You Successful In Life?, we explain why systems thinking is critical to success and described some basic systems and the systems thinking strategy.

The key concept here is simple but powerful: small actions performed consistently, day after day, yield huge results when compounded over many, many days! Day by day, we get better and better.

In What Will Make You Successful? Building Effective Systems For Success! we describe how to build effective success systems starting small, and slowing growing to systems that include habits, routines and workflows.

Knowing what to do and doing it are two very different things. We all know eating an apple is good for our health, but instead we eat an ice cream sundae.

To overcome this kind of self-sabotage, we must understand human psychology, and use that as the basic foundation to our framework.

In Limbic Friction Blocking You? 3 Tips That Will Make You Act Now For Success! we describe 3 such tips that work! How to overcome procrastination is always a challenge, but with these 3 tips we are well on our way to action!

In Consistent System Execution: A Habit That Will Make You Successful we show how initiating the system every day can become ingrained into a habit, so you consistently perform all the steps, no matter how complicated the system.

For us to achieve success in life and achieve the things we want, we must:

• Start with a solid foundation built on new identities that define success in terms of values and outcomes
• Embrace the journey by designing systems for success that we perform consistently, day after day, getting better and better

We will expand on each of the steps in our 7 step formula for success in life in later blogs.

Success is possible, but we need to focus on the journey, become better every day. Then, success becomes inevitable! Eventually, the goal is subsumed by our overall development.

References

Our 7 step formula for success in life curates and synthesizes from the seminal work of many:

James Clear, “Atomic Habits”

Scott Adams, “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life”

Daniel Coyle, “The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How.“

Carol Dweck, “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success”

Angela Duckworth, “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance”

Charles Duhigg, “The Power of Habit”

Michelle Segar, “The Joy Choice“

And numerous other research articles and blog posts.