Unlocking Success: Embrace the Numbers Game and Normalize Achievement

My husband is a product designer, specifically in the high end cycling realm, but because he's creative and curious, he's always exploring how to design and make other products that might find a place in this world. In another time, he truly would have been an inventor. But what I enjoy about his creative pursuits is that they usually lead him to un-planned and interesting places... One such place that he has landed recently is understanding more in depth personal taxes, wealth and cash-flow. I know - kind of a weird jump from the physical product realm, and it sounds about as interesting as watching paint dry, but he shared two tidbits with me recently that I felt applied beyond the realm of finance. 

1) Success Is A Numbers Game 

Think of a tray of seeds - each seed came from the same parent plant, it has the same soil, same growth environment of light and water, but even with all our best attempts - not every seed is going to germinate. Your success rate increases with the amount of seeds you plant. AKA It's a numbers game - you may get lucky on the first go, but you have a higher chance of success with more attempts that you make. 

What I like about this analogy is that it takes the emotion out of the project/goal/thing that you're trying to achieve, and helps reframe it to getting over our (cough, cough - looking at myself) perfectionism. 

Trying to lose weight? It's not about you showing up to execute the perfect workout everyday - It's about just showing up more than anything - wether showing up is 5 minutes or a full session. 

Trying to launch that side hustle? Yes, batch working is amazing. Having undisturbed time is awesome. BUT, if you're a mom, maybe you have a 9-5 too, on top of everything else that needs to happen to make a family life run smoothly... consistent, undisturbed time to work on other projects can be unrealistic. However, if you're able to work on a task, even incrementally, this is not a fail, its progress - sowing the seeds for success. 

Think of other areas where maybe you're not showing up, and you want to, but if you're like me (seriously, I work on this all the time) and if it doesn't happen exactly the way that you want, it basically feels like why even bother - ya know? This has been a major mental barrier for me to overcome. For example; I consider myself an active person who exercises regularly - this was definitely true pre kids, HOWEVER if I actually audit myself now, it's not as true as I want it to be... because if I'm not able to get undisturbed time to move my body I just won't do it. It feels like even a few minutes is not enough and in the dream world my head wants to live in sometimes, it just puts up the red flag and says 'nope' in the world I actually live in. I have to actively work on ignoring this flag and just reminding myself - the best case scenario doesn't exist right now, but something is better than nothing - SO DO SOMETHING! 

The next time a barrier pops up to getting closer to a goal you're working on - check in with yourself and ask, am I putting a barrier up because this isn't exactly how I want it to be? Or is it something else? Because the more seeds we sow, the better success rate we see :)

Now, onto point number two! 

2) Normalizing Success 
This ties into my first point, I promise. I ask that you hang with me though as I connect the dots. 

We're familiar with the concept of emotional desensitization to violence: 

"Theoretically, desensitization to violence represents a form of habituation, a well-established type of non-associative learning that results in diminished response to a stimulus after repeated exposure (Rankin et al., 2009). Thus, for instance, witnessing community violence would initially elicit strong negative emotional reactions, but after repeated exposure to community violence these emotional reactions would be dampened, resulting in less emotional distress. Habituation typically extends to similar stimuli and across contexts through the process of stimulus generalization (Rankin et al., 2009). Thus, for example, witnessing a fight in the community may produce desensitization to other types of violence in the same context (e.g., threats, shootings), as well as violence observed in other settings (e.g., home or school)." (Link)

Essentially, we abhor a violent act the first time we witness it, but with more exposure, we become desensitized. This desensitization is a coping mechanism. There is a flip side to this though... we can use the same principle to desensitize us to success OR as I called this section - we can learn to normalize success. 

Getting back to that main point - success is a numbers game, if we keep trying at the thing we're working towards (again, even if it's not in the way we would want it to be) we also are in the process of desensitizing ourselves to success to the point where success becomes normal. Because, we've exposed ourselves to it to the extent of habituation.  

I don't know if this excites you as much as it did for me, but it felt like a mental break-through! Like, a mental hack - why am I getting so caught up in perfection, when that doesn't get me where I want to be any quicker?! And I can leverage just doing the thing to increase my success, period. End of story.