Success Through Underachievement
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Today I’d like to discuss a skill that as I have learned it, has contributed greatly to anything that I have accomplished. I call it success through underachieving. It is also found in Rich Dad’s books but this is my spin on it. This story was inspired by a friend of mine who told me that he admired my commitment to becoming rich. The word commitment didn’t sit well inside me. To me commitment seems like a whole lotta work and unneeded effort. Rather than shove commitment down into my
soul, I realized that what I like to do is to always target a goal of gentle underachievement.
Robert Kiyosaki illustrates it by saying if you want to lose 30 pounds don’t put yourself on a 2 hour a day gym routine. Start by going for a walk around the block and doing it every day. Having consistent success at meeting a tiny goal is more important than the big goal.
If you want to make 100 affiliate sites, start by having a goal to create 1 page of content every day. Celebrate that one page, your day was a success. You body and mind don’t like dramatic change. To have long term positive change you need to reprogram yourself at the molecular level. And this is a slow process. At first it takes one tiny mini little drop into your parched self-esteem bucket. Anything more than that will be too much of a shock. Even if you did do the full 2 hours at the gym, you won’t feel like
doing it again the next day, you won the battle, but for sure you’ll lose the war.
To succeed where it matters, the most important skill is to pay attention and do less. Leave some on the table for tomorrow. When you start going to the gym [or creating websites] what you want to do at the beginning is not to loose 10 pound on the first day, but rather to gently whet your appetite for movement. To regain the innate love of motion that has dried up in you. Same for creating websites or any other busiess. Think of the process as rediscovering your love of work and accomplishment rather than a
mindless march towards some numbered accomlishment.
Why does this technique work? because there is kindness in giving yourself easy achieved simple goals. Most of us are used to setting big unrealistic goals, then failing, then using that failure to beat ourselves up, confirming our self doubts and therefore making it much harder to get motivated for our next venture.
Setting very small goals that are gentle and easy to achieve is being kind with yourself and when you can learn to be kind with yourself and be on your own side you will have found the secret to success. You will have met your dream boss and all big goals will now be achievable because they will be composed of an enjoyable series of fun steps rather than a tortuous and self-fracturing discipline.
