Hands of man checking wrist watch with 2 hands

How to Reduce the Time to be Successful in Life?

According to Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, mastery in a field takes approximately ten thousand hours of practice. That necessitates a level of consistency and discipline in terms of showing up and practicing on a daily basis.

Let us consider the above statement to be true.
Now, If you spend 10 hours per day to learn a new skill then in a year you are giving 3650 hours ( ie 365*10 hours) for it. So it will roughly take around 3 years (ie 3650*3=10950 hours) of consistent practice for 10 hours per day to achieve mastery over that field.

So if you spend 5 hours per day in it you will be a master in 6 years. But spending 5 hours/ is practically feasible. I have read an interview of an IAS Topper who used to spend 5 hours/day in his deep studies from his childhood. So if you learn something from your early ages of life you don’t have to spend a lot of time per day to achieve mastery over a specified field.

As soon as you become master over the field, you will expect to get positive results. But first you have to advertise your skill, so that people would recognise your mastery. This would again take around three years of consistent advertisement to become a good advertiser and marketer of your skill. Again you have to devote 10 hours per day to develop the skill of marketing and advertisement.

So our life demands 6 years of consistent work to be highly successful in any field. We have to remember that there is no shortcut to success. More you practice more you will be confident over yourself.

Repetition is Key Factor of Consistency

As a result, repetition is the key to consistency. It’s all about doing the same things over and over again, getting input from them, and making adjustments to help you stay on track while you move towards your target. And that, in essence, is the difference between success and failure in every area of endeavor, as well as the secret to achieving high levels of success.

So far, I’ve learned that I need to be more careful in my life and company, and that I need to take consistent action every day. And, as I’ve discovered, every time I stop, it’s far more difficult to restart. Consistency provides order to your day, allowing you to be more productive and effective. You actually know what you need to accomplish.

Although we hear of instant success stories, the majority of success stories are not like that. Blood, sweat, and tears have gone into them. As well as continuity. You need the splash of consistency in the recipe of life.

You can make a consistency calender Template shown below to track your consistency.

A griddled box showing tick and cross marks
A Consistency Calender Template

Calculate your consistency percentage

Let,

✔️ = number of days your daily mission was completed
❌ = number of days Your daily mission remained uncompleted

Then
Consistency (%)
= ✔️ /(✔️+❌) *100
In in the above calendar template
Consistency (%)
=26/30*100=86.7%
➡️ excellent consistency level

If the consistency percent is:
Above 85 ➡️ excellent consistency level
70 to 85 ➡️ It is good but requires improvement
Below 70 ➡️ very poor consistency level, you have to work really hard to reach a respectable consistency level.

Choosing a Tight Growth Structure

But consistency without growth is just like attending an office job for last 10 to 20 years without any type of innovation in it. Everyone says “Be creative.” But how? You have to devote sometime everyday on trying to do something new in your own field. This inturn will boost your growth structure. Otherwise you will follow the same plan, same action and you will get same result as before. After 3 years you will realise that you are in the same place as you were 3 years back but you were highly consistent in those times.

Even if you follow a successful man and do the same things like him, 99% chance is that you will be a damm failure.Why this happens? This is due to lack of growth and creativeness inside you. You only watched external talent of that man but you are unaware of his inner qualities and capabilities. You will never be able to copy someone’s inner talents. So it is better to create your own internal talents.

How to Grow your Internal Talents Unconsciously?

Everything is created in the mind of a human being then it is created in the outer world. So creativity lies inside our mind. If you search it in the outer world you will never reach your correct destination. To develop creativity and growth do this.

A) Think, Experiment, Act and be Ready to Face Failure

My mind is not sharp then how can I think creatively? Firstly you have to understand that you are thinking to do something differently not creatively. Suppose you write with your right hand but today you tried to write with your left hand. Similarly in your professional field you have to try to do things differently. Here are few steps that can boost up your creativity.

1.Think and Imagine

Think any process to do it differently and imagine that different process is beneficial to you. Then imagine how you are going to experiment and take massive action. This imagination and thinking should not be vague, but it should be realistic and practically feasible.

2. Experiment

Take a baby step to check the process you selected is working otherwise rethink and make modification in your plan and again perform the experiment in a different way till you get somewhat positive result out of it.

3. Massive Action

Now take massive actions to complete your project / process because experimenting in small scale is a completely different process than doing it practically in larger scale.

4. Rethink and Modify

At first failure is certain. Be prepared mentally not disturb your emotional intelligence at failure. Failure is natural and success comes after a series of failure. So what to do? Rethink and modify your plan and try again. If you are not going to modify your plan, it is obvious that you are going to to get the same result as before.

5. Apply it Frequently

Apply this technique on as many processes as possible one by one. When you have mastered this technique with regular practice on different objectives then you have attained quality to make things bigger and better or indirectly became creative by nature along with quality to grow something for better.

Flow chart to grow inner talentd
A Flow chart to Grow inner Talents

B) Learn How to Prioritise the Work Schedules

We all have a habit of doing unnecessary and useless work first. No matter how efficient you are you will reach nowhere after completion of 3 years if you can’t move away from the clutches of this habit.

Now, I will discuss in brief how to prioritise your work. Look at the diagram very carefully.

Priority wise distribution of work in two by two table
Dividing the work according to priority

According to the above diagram distribute your work accordingly. Your first priority will be P1, Second will be P2 and third will be P3. If you have completed P1, P2 and P3 then only invest time on P4 otherwise reject P4 completely.

Prioritising work is an art. You can prioritise it in your mind but the best way is to write on a piece of paper or hang a written work schedule on the wall. If you search the net, you will find plenty of techniques on how to prioritise your work schedule. You will find all the techniques are correct but administrating yourself to follow these techniques is the key factor that determines the degree of achievement you want to accomplish.

How to follow the prioritised work schedule easily

In this context I am not going to discuss how to prioritise but I would like to share some tips on how you can follow the prioritized work schedule easily.

1.Create Daily Mission of Work Schedule

Long term work schedules are difficult to follow because we don’t exactly know about when and how the project will complete. Past has gone forever and future is not in our hand, we only have power to control our present. Creating a daily mission to complete some specified jobs on regular basis is better than creating a weekly, monthly and yearly schedule. You can correlate your daily mission with long term schedules at the end of the day. Also Create Your daily mission work Schedule on the previous day just before when you go to bed.

2. Selection of Work

Don’t make your daily schedule too long. Select 4 or 5 tasks/ day that would need 1 hour each to complete. Otherwise you will lose interest over the work after few days.

3. Mention time needed to complete the work

This is the most important thing. For each task allot the time within which you want to complete the task. Otherwise you will lose focus over the job to be done.

4. Best Time to Start

I can do anything I want in the current moment. You can’t exactly predict what will happen after 2 hours. Don’t procrastinate to start. Starting a task means that you have reached half your destination. So best time to start is to start now.

5. Follow Pomodoro Technique

Francesco Cirillo developed the Pomodoro Technique in the late 1980s as a time management technique. It employs a timer to divide work into intervals of 25 minutes, with short rests in between. After the tomato-shaped kitchen timer Cirillo used it as a university student, each interval is called a pomodoro, from the Italian word for “tomato.” He had also written a book on Pomodoro technique, that you can buy at Amazon.

Books shown by a magnifying glass
To Buy the book from Amazon click here

There are six steps in the original technique:

1.Choose a task to complete.
2.Set the pomodoro timer to 25 minutes
3. Concentrate on the task in hand.
4.When the timer rings and goes off, stop working and take a short break (5–10 minutes).
5. If you have fewer than three pomodoros, return to Step 2 and repeat until all three pomodoros have been completed.
6.Take the fourth pomodoro after the first three have been completed, and then take a long pause ( 20 to 30 minutes). Return to step 2 after the extended break is over.

If you want to increase your productivity then go to the Play Store by clicking this picture below and download Pomodoro timer

A Tomato's picture showing app in Google Play Store
Pomodoro timer in Google Play Store

6. Don’t follow too compact schedule

A marathon racer runs slowly but steadily as he has to run miles after miles, whereas a 100 meter racer applies his full strength to run in a completion. You have to become a long racer to complete your task. Too much overload of work will make you tired and you will lose interest over the subject resulting in quitting the selected project.

You should make a comfortable plan to be successful in long run. Big successes are achieved only by consistent adding of unlimited short run successes. Make your Daily Mission easy and realistic so that you are able to complete it with ease along with maintaining a good level of consistency.

How Time to Succeed Reduces?

When you were developing the habit of making things better and bigger through your thinking and imagination then you were unconsciously developing the habit of doing it faster. So the time to succeed reduces when you apply the above mentioned techniques in your personal and professional fields.

Conclusion:

Why Time to Succeed Reduces by this Technique?

Actually what is it ? It is a practical self learning process. Whenever you have faced difficulty to solve a practical puzzle, you have solved it through your thinking process thus making your mind adaptable to any odd circumstances. Any acquired skill reduces the time to accomplish its Goal. Creativity means a mind that has developed it own skills but it widely differs from any other person in this world.

Leave a comment