If there’s a formula for success, it would be this: simple actions + time = success.

We often think that really successful people, got it by chance or they were lucky or they had a breakthrough. Like in the movies. A Star is Born just popped into my mind, but you can find countless other examples.

The simple fact is that successful people did the small things every day over and over and over again.

Let’s take losing weight. There’s no magic to this. If you eat healthily and exercise, there’s no way you would not get fit.

Everyone knows this, but not everyone is doing it. Why? Because simple things like taking the stairs every day instead of the elevator are easy to do, but also easy not to do.

However, these simple decisions accumulate. One healthy green juice doesn’t make you any healthier than you were before. Just as one cheeseburger won’t make you fat either.

This is why most people give up. They exercise a couple of weeks and expect results. Seeing no results, they give up. The problem is that the feedback comes late. We just have to trust that the results will come even if we don’t see them immediately.

Smoking is a great example. Having one or two cigarettes doesn’t do anything. Over time it does. Once the person receives the feedback of continuously smoking, it’s usually too late. Just like becoming obese.

Reading books is another great example. Reading 10 pages a day doesn’t do much but repeated every day, you’ve read over 10 books in a year. In 5 years that’s 50-70 books. And that’s just by reading 10 pages. Imagine if you’d read 20-40 pages a day. And listen to an audiobook every time you commute or do the laundry?

This is also why we tend to think it’s all about breakthroughs and being at the right place at the right time. Because we don’t see the invisible change that is taking place, we only see the results.

To become good at anything, we have to do the thing every single day. That’s it. There’s no glamour, only the boring small stuff. But this is what makes the difference.

To find out more about this, I highly recommend reading the Slight Edge by Jeff Olson.

KRISTJAN