Success Spectrum: Can You Be The World’s Most Boring Person?

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who had practiced one kick 10,000 times.” ― Bruce Lee

This one quote summarises the process of success in a manner an entire treatise may fail to do. Success looks glamorous from the outside, but what goes behind it is an invisible force known only to the one who has embarked on that journey.

Many people wish they had somebody else’s life, as their success appears unreachable for others. All we need to know to steer clear of such wishful ideas is the iceberg theory. The theory makes us aware of how beneath the ‘glorious’ success lies the invisible forces – hard work, pain, sacrifice, failure…

Author Shiv Khera says: “Athletes train 15 years for 15 seconds of performance. Ask them if they got lucky. Ask an athlete how he feels after a good workout. He will tell you that he feels spent.” (source: https://tinyurl.com/5abbynfk).

Success is viewed by many people as simply an end result and when it eludes them, they feel somebody else simply got more lucky. No doubt, luck, or let’s say the X Factor, plays a part in life. But to attribute that as a major factor is unfair to those who strive, sacrifice and relentlessly pursue their target with hard work, patience and what I call as Passionate Consistent Repeatability (PCR).

Success is a boring process. You can be successful and sustain it over a long period of time only if you submit yourself to its magnificent boredom and surrender to the excruciating routine it demands. A shining example in public life is Mr Amitabh Bachchan, who at 83, even after over 50 years in the industry, commits himself to a rigour as if he has just started out on his media journey. It is fascinating to see the way he carries himself and the hunger with which he performs even now.

Success thus is about sustaining enthusiasm over a long period of time. It cannot fall prey to stuff like new year resolutions which for many fizzle out even while the new year is still new. It is all about the PCR we just discussed. The three components that make PCR – Passion, Consistency and Repeatability -are what comprise the process of success. It is excruciating and downright boring at times. Yet, what marks out the extraordinary from the ordinary is their ability to go beyond what is comfortable, committing themselves to die hard discipline and an uncompromising routine.

Success begins with motivation, but the process culminates with consistently inspiring self-messaging, which demands a kind of repeatability which is foreign to people who look for newer experiences far too often. Mastery is a magnificently boring process. The world’s most successful people thus are also the most boring as they are seen to be doing the same thing for a lifetime, as mastery is a lifelong quest.

It is a cliché that motivation is temporary and inspiration is permanent. But people who are committed to being masters of their craft leverage motivation everyday to sustain their inspirational path. It is not that however glorious the purpose, they don’t feel the fatigue of the routine, but they find ways to propel themselves everyday by leveraging the power of motivation in their own unique ways.

Success thus is hard and therefore fulfilling. If it was easy, it wouldn’t be success; it would just be an aberration. If sustained success and not fleeting episodes is what matters to you, ask yourself: “Am I ready to become the world’s most boring person?”

(Hariharan Iyer is a seasoned Motivational Speaker, Corporate Trainer and Author of multiple management books. He is the Founder-Creator of Hariharan’s School Of Success Education (HSSE) - www.thehsse.com. He is popularly referred to as The Enter-Trainer®. He can be reached on hariharan@thehsse.com).