Sunday, yay. Oh, look, I’ve got the knobbly head thing happening. Q and A Sunday. As you know, I do this every single Sunday. It either comes up with a question I’ve talked about with friends, or family, or clients, something someone’s directly asked me, or something one of you wonderful people had sent me and said, “Sam, help me with this particular topic.”
This week, I had a lot of conversations with people about what separates successful people from unsuccessful people, and I’m going to say habits is one of those things, but that’s a whole lot of [inaudible 00:00:32] Today, I wanted to talk about in particular the action that successful people take as opposed to the action not so successful people take. I’m not going to say unsuccessful because I believe while you’re walking, talking, I believe while you going for anything in life, you’re successful, regardless of how you actually end up. So I don’t like the term unsuccessful, but it’s what resonates with people so here we go.
It’s about doing a bit more, it’s all about action which links beautifully to goal setting, as you know, but I really want to focus on the action part of it. So successful people are people that attain that unthinkable thing, the people that reach for something and they get it, they go for it, and they get it. What do they do? They take action every single day and they take deliberate action, not passive action, which you can go back to the samanthaleith.com blog and have a search for passive action, and there’s a great live on what passive action actually is. So I won’t go into that here. But it’s about doing that thing that’s going to get you to where you want to go every single day, regardless of what that is.
So you might be trying to go for something, writing a book, you might want to direct a movie, you might want to get your dream body for your wedding, you might want to take a holiday. Whatever your version of success is in this particular chapter of your life, that’s what you need to be taking action on and that concentrated action. And when you’re taking that action, it’s about not taking the easy road. (singing) No, you don’t want to be doing that stuff. You want to do the extra bit. And what do I mean by that? You want to do that extra 10%. So if you get sent the challenge to do 20 pushups, you do 22 pushups. You know what I mean? You just push yourself that little bit, that 10%.
10%’s actually not that much, but the problem is what we try and do is we try and go, “I’m going to change everything overnight and do it all just 100%. I’m just going to absolutely go for it.” And then you can’t actually do that. You collapse in a heap because you’ve just set unrealistic expectations. Whereas if you go, “I’m going to do that extra 10%,” it’s doable. It’s so doable, okay?
And on that, another one is just do an extra one. Oh, I’ve just had a total mental blank about what his name is. Ed, Ed, Ed. [Milet 00:03:07] talks about this. So he talks about when you’re at the gym, if you’re doing 30 minutes on a treadmill, do 31 minutes on the treadmill. If you’re making sales calls and you do 10 sales calls, do 11 sales calls. So it’s about whatever you’re doing, whatever the action is you’re doing to get to where you want to go, just do one more, just do one more. One more call, one more rep, one more visit, one more book, one more bit of research, one more of everything to get you to where you want to go.
And the last one, which is they’re all like this because they’re all about taking that consistent, purposeful action. And that’s the deliberate bit that separates people that get what they want in that success and the people that don’t. So the last one on that is, do hard things. Like, just do hard things, finish hard things. I heard this great interview with a golfer whose name I’m not going to remember because I’m just not into golf. And he was saying he met with another golfer and they were asking what separated like the top of the crew from like not quite top of the crew in the golfing world. And he gave this analogy of when he was younger and he was being coached. This coach had said to him, “You have to do this one shot,” I think it was, “100 times. And every time you miss the shot, you have to go back to the beginning and start again.”
So hit the shot, miss it, start again. Get to 95, miss it, start again. And for this particular golfer, I think he said it took him a day and a half to get to the number. But this younger man he was giving us advice to he bumped into him at a different time and said, “How did you go to that exercise?” And the guy said, “Oh, I got to like 50, whatever.” He’s not playing golf anymore. You got to do the hard things.
When I was younger and in the Australian opera, I did two hours singing practice every day. Up and down the scales, up and down the scales, practicing songs, practicing [inaudible 00:05:12], just practicing how to move my mouth. You have to do the hard things in order to be successful. There is no quick way. There is no easy way. You might look at some people and think, “Oh, they were an overnight success.” Those overnight successes, a local example, so Tones and I, the Australian singer with the Dance Monkey song that you either love or you really, really hate. Phenomenal success and everyone said, “She’s come out of nowhere, she’s such a success.” She sang so much with lots of different people. She was busking for hours, and hours, and hours every single day in lots of places in order to reach the level of success that she’s got. So you got to do the hard things. There is no easy road.
So there you go. Question is what is it that separates those successful people? It’s doing stuff, honestly. And we can do so much more than we think. So tomorrow, today, tonight, whatever, do the extra 10%, do the extra one thing or do the very hardest thing in order to get to that goal that you really, really, really want to reach. Speaking of goals, I had to do these 365 days of Facebook Lives, that was my thing goal, and I’m nearly there. Yay balloons. So if you can please go over to samanthaleith.com/365days and sign up and get your invite to the last night, I would really, really love and appreciate that. Have a great Sunday and I will see you all to tomorrow. Bye.