There Is No Good or Bad Strategy. There's Just a Strategy.

How to succeed and decide on how you want to get there.

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We all want to be successful.

And that word can mean a thousand different things. It depends on who you ask.

For someone who wants to become a great runner, success means winning an Olympics.

An avid drummer will say he wants to join the band that would be as popular as, let’s say SOAD.

Business school student who admires Warren Buffet will perceive success as running a holding company just like Berkshire Hathaway.

Success is what you want it to be. It’s very personal and it doesn't necessarily translate onto other people.

But…

There’s a certain theme that comes up when you ask any successful person about how they got to where they’re now.

Most of them will say that the most important characteristics are perseverance, consistency, and tenacity.

Successful people decide on what they want to do and they stick to it.

You and I know that the hardest part is doing. And after you start doing the hardest part is to keep on doing.

Okay, we got it. We have to persevere in order to succeed.

But…

How do we know how to get from the idea to the place of success.

Here comes strategy.

And also here grows the majority of mistakes that people do when they think of a strategy. This particular mistake that I’ll describe can lead to headaches and constant mental pain caused by overthinking.

Namely, let’s say for you being successful is making a $1,000,000 a year. Pretty nice sum.

So, you start reading, watching videos, lectures, and so on to deconstruct how people who earn that much money got to that stage.

Soon you realize that besides the earlier mentioned consistency, these people carried on different lifestyles.

Person A might have invested in real estate. They’ll claim that it’s the best way to get rich.

Person B is a much more risky type of guy. He loves to gamble and he’s a professional Hold’em player. He claims that by mastering poker you’ll get to making a rock a year asap.

Person C, on the other hand, is a coder. He came up with an idea for an app, made it, and sold it for cold hard cash. Now he’s making $1m/year just from consulting to other app-making companies.

After all the books, videos, and blog posts end you’re left with so much information crammed in your brain that the best thing to do is to lay down and cry.

You consumed so much content just to realize there’s no winning strategy.

But…

The reality is much different.

In fact, each of these strategies is the winning one.

Even more!

None of these strategies is a winning one!

There’s no good, bad, winning, or losing strategy. (For haters: I’m excluding things that are against the law. E.g Ponzi. These are not successful by the definition.)

There are only better or worse plans but not one of them is a winning one.

How can that be?

It all boils down to that one characteristic of every successful person.

Perseverance is what turns ANY strategy into success.

It’s important what you do and how consistent you’re at doing it. Yet, it doesn't matter how you get to that point.

Oftentimes any plan will be better than no plan but here the difference will be the time that it’ll take you to succeed.

The overall conclusion is that success takes time. Things like 10,000-hour rule and 10-year rule are more or less true. It takes time + consistency to get to your wildest dreams.

The funny thing is that I see the confirmation of that argument in all the scammy online courses that you can find on the Internet.

Many of the (if not all) scammy online courses consist of testimonials of successful students who took the course and got to where they wanted to be. I reckon that some of them might be fake given the nature of such tricks but in many (again, if not all) cases there are actual people who took the course, followed it, and succeeded.

It happens because of three things.

1 - The strategy doesn’t matter so even a poor one will yield results over time. Most of these courses put pressure on the student, something like if you don’t succeed, it means you didn’t work hard enough.

2 - They persevered and consistently followed the outlined strategy.

3 - The law of large numbers turned up to the party. If a strategy doesn't matter then the more students who enroll and take the course the higher the chance someone will get the desired results.

To conclude.

Don’t delve into how you should do what you want to do.

Pick the right thing to pursue and keep on doing. That’s how you get to the point of success no matter what this word means to you.