There are No Shortcuts to Success

By Greg Fullerton

One time, during a seminar I was teaching, a woman asked me to expand on the concept of needing to leave your comfort zone to reach a goal.

My response was sheer genius:

“Uhhhh…eeeyeah. To reach a goal you really, really, really need to leave your comfort zone.”

I’m pretty sure I got crowned the world’s most articulate corporate trainer that day (although, strangely, I’m still waiting for my trophy to arrive).

All right, so it was a bone-headed response.

That is, unless you dig deeper. Whether I meant it at the time or not, there’s actually some deep wisdom in that response.

It boils down to this: There are no shortcuts. There are no exceptions to natural laws of success. There are no quick fixes to life’s real problems.

There are no fancy words to explain that you just gotta buckle down and do the right things for a long enough period of time.

A lot of times we ask questions like the one posed by that lady during my seminar because, subconsciously, we’re hoping we can find some loophole to make the journey easier.

It’s like Steven Wright says:

“I’ve been making wine lately, but I make it out of raisins so it will be aged automatically.”

Life just doesn’t work that way. Every form of success comes with its own unique price to pay. And the greater the success, the higher the price.

The journey may be difficult, but the process and principles are simple:

• Take time to discover who you really are and what’s important to you, discover and prioritize your values, and define your goals.
• Take time to sharpen your saw consistently.
• Get clear on your principles and live them with integrity.
• Perform ongoing maintenance to ensure your ladder is leaning against the right wall.
• Do the hard work first.
• Manage your mindset and cultivate an abundance mentality so you can turn obstacles into stepping stones and cultivate a healthy and accurate self-identity.
• Never stop learning and developing yourself, no matter how old you are.
• Consciously manage your fear.
• Be proactive and actively seek opportunities, rather than waiting for your ship to come in.
• Focus on what you can control, and forget about the rest.
• Create and live by your own rules, rather than defaulting to social norms.
• Team up and synergize with others to compensate for your weaknesses.
• Always look for and capitalize on opportunities to serve others, no matter how insignificant it may seem.

I could go on. But you already know this stuff. It permeates your soul. We just like to forget sometimes because we’re afraid of the hard work.

But as Mike Larkins says, “You can build it right or you can build it fast, but you can’t do both.”