Grind your way to success

Because luck is rare

Sudden, overnight success seems to be everywhere. It is in movies, in the news, on social media.

But quick success is very rare, and often involves a long period of preparation. For every person who literally or metaphorically wins the lottery there are millions who don’t.

It is better to assume that everything will take longer.

This has certainly been my experience.

Investing

Fifteen years ago I was newly unemployed, had no savings, and was trying to support a large family. I started slowly, first saving up money each month, then opening broker accounts and investing.

I made a lot of mistakes. Had I not done so we would have made more money, more quickly.

But it didn’t matter because I kept on saving and investing every month. For years it felt like not much was happening, and we would never reach our goals.

But then one day we were there.

Slowly, slowly, slowly, then all at once.

You often hear stories about people getting rich overnight with cryptocurrencies, or by choosing stocks, but I wouldn’t count on being able to do that.

English school

My wife owns an English school. It started over 20 years ago when she was working for a national school called the Bing Bang Boom club. She ran a couple of classrooms for them and taught a few dozen students.

Then one day she came to work to find a notice on the door. The company president had run off with all the money, so she wasn’t going to be paid and her students lost all the fees they paid in advance.

Some of them (ten or so) asked her to keep teaching them, so she rented a room in a community center and asked me to help her teach the classes.

Now the school has over 400 students and a dozen staff, but it’s been a slow grind all the way. It took us five years to get to fifty students at first, then things picked up a bit.

You often read stories about people opening a school and getting hundreds of students in a month, but our experience was very different.

RetireJapan

I started RetireJapan ten years ago. At first it was just a blog, then it grew organically into the forum, social media, live events, publications, and coaching.

Anyone coming across it today might be impressed, but it has been a long, slow journey. Week in, week out. Almost 1,000 blog posts, more than 4,000 forum posts, countless social media posts, thousands of hours of writing, several hundred coaching sessions.

We never got lucky, never went viral, never had one thing make a huge difference. It was just a case of working away for years and years.

I wouldn’t recommend doing something like this unless you enjoy it and are prepared to work at it for a long time.

YouTube

And of course, YouTube has been the same. You always see the stories of the overnight successes on YouTube, the people who had a viral hit (or several viral hits) and now have large audiences and profitable channels.

That has NOT been my experience.

I think the channel has been successful and I’m really happy with how it is going, but it’s been a grind. Making one or more videos every week for over a year now. Finding the time to write, shoot, edit, and upload every week.

It’s been hard but also interesting and rewarding. YouTube has done a great job of gamifying the experience, and you get rewarded each time you make changes and improve things.

How to grind your way to success

My experience is that grinding your way to success is simple but not easy. You just need to:

  1. start
  2. do something useful regularly that moves you forward
  3. make changes as needed (kaizen)
  4. not give up

That’s it. If you do that you will likely succeed (eventually) at pretty much anything. There is probably a secret extra step (asking people for help) that can accelerate things, but it is not strictly necessary.

How about you? Have you been able to grind your way to success at anything? Would you tweak my formula?

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9 Responses

  1. I think reaching your investment goal in 15 years requires both luck (i.e. favourable trends in stock markets and exchange rates) and a high family income (so you can invest a lot). Without these it’s virtually impossible!

      1. True. But for a sum that will allow you to retire early, for example ichi oku en, I think that 15 years is tight. Not impossible, and a great achievement if you can do it, but you’ll need luck, high income and a high savings rate to do it from almost zero.

  2. I’ve had very much the same experience. It’s kind of cruel that you don’t work this stuff out until you grow a little older (I didn’t, anyway). When I was in my 20’s, looking ahead 5 years seemed like an eternity. But your perspective of timelines seems to change dramatically as you get older. I think the big takeaway is to do something you truly enjoy. If you truly enjoy what you do, you’ll enjoy the grind. Finding something you enjoy in life is the real goal. Once you find that, everything else usually follows.

  3. That’s one way to look at it.
    But another way is that you are unemployed again (because you didn’t willingly retire, your contract was over iirc), so you work part time as a teacher at your wife’s school, and as a blogger/coach.
    Furthermore, it looks like your high savings rate and paid out mortgage was largely thanks to your wife’s high income and luck with a friend selling the mansion cheap.

    1. Even if that were completely true, it wouldn’t change the point of the post 😉

      Doing something sensible for a long time is likely to lead to good things.

      Hoping for quick success or luck much less likely.

  4. Long-time follower, first-time commenter. Excellent post!
    I have been fighting my own tendencies to give up after initial setbacks, allow the priorities of others to usurp my own and pursue projects without first establishing the identity I aspire to. Slowly, I’m learning the value of persistent daily actions, and your experiences are further proof. Thanks for the inspiration!