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Success Quote by Robert Collier

“Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.”

Have you ever heard this quote?  Success requires constant, small improvements and effort, repeated over time.

It’s not enough to do something once.  Why?  Almost anyone could sell a product once.  They could work on their book once.  They could do a great job once.  But to do those things every day – even when they are boring, even when they don’t feel like it, even when you’d rather do something else – until they add up to something great is where the real magic is.

Why It’s Magic

It’s magic because most people won’t put in the effort, because putting in the effort is boring.

On the other hand, coming up with ideas, talking about “what could be” or what could have been, and shooting the breeze with your friends are enjoyable and easy things to do. It’s the execution that is hard. Putting in the effort every day to learn and grow, build something and get the outcome you want is hard, which is why so few people actually do it. And those who do it find that few actually follow through.

In fact, just writing about “following through” is easy to do as well!  Writing this one article is easy, but writing one every day for three years takes repeated effort!

Write Down Your Destination

How can we stay focused on the small efforts we need to do?  Write down your goals.  Yes, you’ve heard it all before. Everyone tells you to write down your goals. And sometimes it’s hard to come up with what your goals might be. How do you know it’s the right destination?  Sometimes you don’t, and you have to “iterate” towards your dreams.

You can put in the research at the beginning, you can work on it and get feedback from your results, and maybe your results aren’t what you wanted (or the daily process isn’t what you wanted). It’s then you can pivot and change your focus, maybe ever so slightly. One part of your product might resonate better with customers, or you may enjoy certain parts of a task more than others and want to focus your efforts there.  Sometimes you don’t know before you try.

Love the Process

This is also why the great business people around the world will tell you to “love the process”.  Warren Buffett says that he “loves the process more than the proceeds”, in other words he’s not doing it for the money.  The irony of this is that the money often comes anyway when you enjoy something so much that you are willing to work on it for 14 hours a day.

And that’s what Robert Collier is talking about when he says “The sum of small efforts, day in and day out.” Love the process, and those small 1% improvements will add up and compound on each other over time, and in 10 years you will look back and think “Wow, look how far I’ve come.”

– David McLachlan

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