Have you ever asked yourself, “Why is such and such so successful?” That such and such could be someone like Oprah, President Obama, Beyonce or even Lupita Nyong’o. Consistency is the surefire way to guarantee success. The top performers in any field prove one major thing–they are all consistent. hey show up and deliver day after day while everyone else gets bogged down with the urgencies of daily life and fights a constant battle between procrastination and motivation. While many of us get demotivated and off-track after a bad performance, a bad workout, or simply a bad day at work, top performers settle right back into their pattern the next day.
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I am here to help you be great, and stop procrastinating on your dream, goals, desires, or whatever it is that you want out of life, but haven’t gotten it. Funny man and mogul, Jerry Seinfeld, may well be one of the most successful comedians of all time. Banking a staggering $267 million in 1998 and consistently bringing in about $85 million each year after that, one could argue that Seinfeld’s bountiful career has been consistent. See, there it is again–consistency, or the key to enduring success. Why am I talking about Seinfeld? Well, it’s because this man his a strategy for success that is affectionately named, “The Seinfeld Strategy.”
The Seinfeld Strategy helps to take the focus off of each individual performance and puts the emphasis on the process of reaching your goals. Pick one specific goal at a time and focus on that. The first step is to choose a task that is simple enough to be sustainable. At the same time, you have to make sure that your actions are meaningful enough to matter. So often, we assume that excellence requires a monumental effort and that our lofty goals demand incredible doses of willpower and motivation. But really, all we need is dedication to small, manageable tasks.
Here’s how The Seinfeld Strategy works:
Brad Isaac was a young comedian starting out on the comedy circuit. One fateful night, he found himself in a club where Jerry Seinfeld was performing. In an interview on Lifehacker, Isaac shared what happened when he caught Seinfeld backstage and asked if he had “any tips for a young comic.”
Here’s how Isaac described the interaction with Seinfeld…
He said the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day.
He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker. He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day.
“After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job is to not break the chain.”
You’ll notice that Seinfeld didn’t say a single thing about results.
It didn’t matter if he was motivated or not. It didn’t matter if he was writing great jokes or not. It didn’t matter if what he was working on would ever make it into a show. All that mattered was “not breaking the chain.”
And that’s one of the simple secrets behind Seinfeld’s remarkable productivity and consistency. For years, the comedian simply focused on “not breaking the chain.”
So here’s your simple key to success–consistency or not breaking the chain. Mastery follows consistency. Are you ready to be a master? How can you use the Seinfeld Strategy in your own life to get the things you want?
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