The Three Principal Components of Success

Success is gained through having a SMART goal, good planning, perseverance, and some other principles. If you seriously want to achieve a certain goal, you need to try your best and do all it takes to reach it or you will easily wear out and quit it with a lot of frustrations. In this blog post, we attempt to introduce three principal components of success, concentration, confidence, and consistency, which can help you review your method and make any changes needed in order to hit your targets easier and better.

Concentration

Concentration or ‘deep work’ means being focused and putting all your attention, thought and energy on a single thing which ultimately results in hitting your target. In other words, if you want to achieve a goal you need to throw yourself into it, and cut all the distractions in order to focus on your goal more deeply. If you think you spend a fair amount of time doing a special activity, and still cannot get the expected result, it could be that you are not concentrated or focused enough. There are many different methods to increase your powers of concentration, but we are highlighting only two extremely effective methods here. 

How to be more concentrated?

• Don't multitask: choose only one activity at a time and avoid any other thing; dividing your attention between 2-3 activities, disturbs your concentration, especially when learning something new; you need to put all your attention on one thing in order to do it perfectly; for example, if you’re listening to a podcast in order to practice listening skills, avoid doing any other thing, like cleaning up, driving, or else; you need to be highly attentive to stay focused. Multi-tasking in serious tasks will not save you any time; on the contrary, it will cause you trouble concentrating and spending more time on a single project and most of the time will lead to frustration and quitting. 
• Avoid distractors: there are plenty of things which easily break our concentration every day; think about anything that breaks your attention and simply avoid it; for instance, if that’s your phone, or PC, turn it off or disable the notifications; social media, unwanted messages and notifications easily break our concentration. You need to throw yourself into your goal which takes plenty of focus in order to reach it.

Confidence

Confidence is a vital trait which plays an important role in helping us succeed in our plans, & overcome challenges or obstacles in life; in fact, it is confidence that breeds success. If you already lack it, you know what I’m talking about; confidence is not about bragging or boasting about yourself or being arrogant of who you are; it’s more about having faith in you and believing that you are able to do certain stuff. Self-confidence is of high importance and if you are confident enough to do something, you will certainly do it; without self-assurance you may never get ahead. 

When someone is lack of confidence, he’s too shy to express himself or stand up for his rights which leads to missing a lot of opportunities. Lack of confidence provokes self-doubt and most failures in our lives whereas self-confidence helps you take action without worrying about the result as you already believe in yourself. It acts like a drive to push you forward and start the challenge. 

How to be more confident?

• Appear confident; wear your most cool, clean, comfortable clothes. Pay attention to your gesture and posture when communicating with people as your body language reveals a lot about you. If you look confident on the outside, people will believe in you and when you feel this, your confidence increases. 
• Don’t worry about failures; in other words, put a room for failure, embrace it, and remember that every failure is the precursor of future success. understand the reasons of your failure, write down your weaknesses and strengthen them. If someone never fails, means they never try.  
• Believe in yourself and have some faith in your abilities. Every single person has unique talents or abilities; you just need to understand your limits, stretch them and unlock your main potential. So, write down your skills & abilities and appreciate them. 

Consistency   

You may have heard the saying, ‘practice makes perfect’ so often and you might have neglected its real meaning and effect. Whenever you see someone doing an activity perfectly, without any issues, you are inspired to do it too and reach such level of expertise; but we have to be honest with ourselves, no pain no gain, you have to put some effort on it, and in order to achieve your goal you need some order and discipline. Well, here’s the other crucial key to success: consistency. 

Consistency means doing things regularly in a particular time and place and maintain the process until you reach the target; to put it simply, you should continue doing something in the same way, with the same standards in order to develop a routine. Imagine that you’re planning to run a marathon, or write a book, or win a special contest, to reach them, all you need to have is a regular, disciplined, and of course mindful practice. Maintaining a certain level of consistency or continuity can have a great impact on our performance and productivity.

Imagine you’re planning to learn a foreign language and you need it as the first step of the success ladder; for instance, you want to get a nice job overseas, or you’re planning to emigrate or study abroad. You have a time limit, and you are busy with so many other activities. There you go, you already have a goal but you need to have a plan or disciplined order of study to learn the target language. Here are some steps to help you more.

How to be consistent? 

• Prioritize your main goal: what’s the most important step to help you achieve your final goal; whenever you have a special target, you need to prioritize it first, and then plan for it. Set the best part of your day and a great deal of time for your target. You can plan other activities below the list. 
• Have a method: what’s the plan? how are you going to do it? when? where? You need to grab an approach of studying, a fixed order or a practical method, based on your learning skills. Adapt an appropriate learning habit and develop it during your plan. For instance, decide about the books you should study, the number of vocabulary or grammar, the time of the day and techniques of learning. 
• Have a schedule & a checklist: monitor yourself and give yourself a tick in your checklist; do your plan and continue it until you reach your first goal; As an example: if you choose to learn 10 new vocabularies with their word families, meanings, & usages every day, after 10 days, you’ll learn more than 100 new words which is a great result; however, you need to be realistic with your goals. Over time, you’ll see how some small steps forward add up to a lot of mileage.

It’s always important to show some consistency in your work as it can be the quickest way to climb the ladder of success. Success depends on the fact that how much time and effort you spend on something; Anthony Robbins puts this nicely, “It's not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives, but what we do consistently.”

Conclusion

To sum up, setting a goal is not the only way to success, but actually you need to know how to reach it quickly & efficiently. By building up your confidence and having faith in your abilities you can step forward and stand up for yourself; it’s also essential to concentrate fully on your target; however, you need to be consistent in your approach to climb the success ladder faster. Be confident, consistent and concentrated, then your success is guaranteed.

Key Words & Phrases

Pay attention to the bold words, most of them are there to help you recognize the right collocations.

• To concentrate, verb = to focus  
• Concentration, noun = focus
• Concentrated, adjective = focused
• To lose/break/disturb concentration
• To throw yourself into sth = to start doing an activity with a lot of effort and energy
• Confidence, noun = the belief in yourself
• Confident, adjective = sure
• Self-confidence = self-assurance, noun 
• Self-confident = self-assured, adjective 
• To get ahead = to be successful
• Precursor, noun= sth that happened or existed before something else and influenced its development
• Consistency, noun = continuity
• Consistent, adjective = continuous & regular
• Lack of = not enough of.      e.g.  lack of Concentration/confidence/consistency
• Practice makes perfect: if you do an activity regularly, you will become very good at it
• No pain no gain: you can only achieve something, for example become fitter, by suffering or working hard

3 Principal Components of Success

Robi B