7 Easy Ways How to Increase Your Commitment to Success

Are you truly committed to success? We all know that if you want to achieve greater success in life, you need to be committed to it. There is no free lunch in this world and success isn’t going to fall from the sky. If you need to achieve success, you need to be 100% committed to it to make it work. But, how do you increase your level of commitment?

This is the question that we are going to answer in this article.

Your level of commitment determines your level of success. Extraordinary people went on to achieve great things in life because they are committed to their success.

They are willing to put in the hard work, to wake up early, to stay later, to work on their goals and the success they desire day and night.

When you are 100% committed, you will do the same.

In this article published on Medium, I talked about the commitment of Tiger Woods in becoming the best golfer in the world…

Before Damon Dunn became a professional football player and then founding a real-estate development firm, he attended Stanford University in the mid-90s.

Damon recalled heading to a Stanford fraternity party while he was a student. It was 11 PM, dark, and that night, it rained heavily.

Damon then noticed a lone figure at the driving range, methodically hitting golf balls. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.

Four hours later, at 3 AM, Damon left the part for his dorm. Thwack. Thwack. The figure was still there, still hitting golf balls. Damon wandered over.

“Tiger, what are you doing out there hitting balls at 3 AM?”

“It doesn’t rain very often in Northern California,” replied the kid who went on to become one of the most successful golfers in history. “It’s the only chance I have to practice hitting in the rain.”

So, you have to ask yourself this question right now: Am I truly committed to achieving the success I want?

When you are committed, you will do whatever it takes. But when you are not committed, you will do what is convenient.

This is why people say one thing and do another. They say they want to build a successful business, but when they get back home, all they do is watching Netflix and scrolling Facebook.

They are not committed to the success they want. Hence, they end up procrastinating and doing something pleasurable.

Never let this be you. Learn to increase and build an insatiable commitment to the success you desire. Here are the 7 ways how you can do so…

1. Commit to a system

First, you must commit to a system, not a goal. That is not to say you shouldn’t have a goal. A goal is good enough to get you started, but having a system is what gets you results. Allow me to explain.

If you are a basketball player, your goal might be to win the championship. Your system is the way you train, the hours you put in to build your body, and how you practice your skills.

Now, what happens if you work on the system without having the goal? You’d probably still going to achieve the goal of winning the championship.

This is what I mean by committing to a system, not a goal.

Too many people focus on the goal and they ignore the system. They put in too much time thinking about the goal, but never the system.

Consider these few examples below:

• An entrepreneur’s goal is to build a million-dollar business. And the system is how he tests and launch his product ideas, hire and manage employees, and market the products.

• A musician’s goal might be to play a new music piece. And the system is how he trains, practices, handles any problem that surfaces and learns from his mistakes.

• A blogger’s goal might be to build a successful and profitable blog. And the system is how he writes, publishes, conveys his messages, and how he markets and promote his blog.

Can you see the difference between a goal and a system right now?

A goal gives you direction, but a system gives you progress. And progress equals results.

When you take care of the system, the goal will take care of itself. Therefore, what you need to do to become more committed is to work on the system.

As James Clear wrote in this article, “Goals can provide direction and even push you forward in the short-term, but eventually a well-designed system will always win. Having a system is what matters. Committing to the process is what makes the difference.”

Takeaway:

Identify your system. Find out what are the action steps that will take you to your goals. And then commit yourself to work on the system.

2. Increase your desire for success

Imagine you have lost in the middle of a desert. You have nothing to eat and you have just finished the final drop of water in your bottle. You’re hungry, tired, exhausted, and it is extremely hot.

After 2 days, you saw someone with a camel walk by. Of course, you rushed to that person and asked for help, and you wanted water from him.

What if that person refuses to give you his water? What do you think will happen? You’d take his water forcefully, even if that means putting up a fight.

That’s the kind of desire you want to develop for the success you want.

Most people lack the commitment because they don’t have a strong desire for success. They are not hungry enough to make things happen.

Do you know how Sylvester Stallone became a successful actor? By putting in 100% commitment to his dream.

Stallone wanted to become a star actor. After being rejected countless times in the audition, he pulled up a chair in front of the manager’s office and sat down, refusing to leave until they gave him a chance to act.

At his lowest point in life, his wife told him to be ‘realistic’ to give up his ‘stupid dream’. Stallone replied, “If I get another job, I would lose the only thing I have got going for me, my hunger. By quitting and getting a job, I would be selling out on my dream.”

Stallone became so broke that he had to sell his dog for $50 to survive. But it all changed after he watched a boxing match between Muhammed Ali and Chuck Wepner. He was inspired and started to write a movie script for 84 hours non-stop. The movie became a huge hit and changed Stallone’s life. The name of the movie? Rocky.

You can read about Sylvester Stallone’s success story here on my blog.

To increase your commitment to success, you need to raise your level of desire and build an insatiable hunger for what you want.

You need to turn “wish to achieve” to “must achieve”.

Takeaway:

Mentally condition yourself to boost your desire for the success you want. Here are a couple of things you can do:

• Write down your goals and review them.
• Practice daily goal setting (read this guide on how to do it).
• Use affirmations to condition the success you want into your head.
• Create a vision board and actively visualize the results you want. Make sure to visualize your progress for getting there too.

3. Get someone to hold yourself accountable

When no one is there, I’m sure you will slack off and procrastinate. When nobody is watching, instead of writing the article, you’d choose to watch YouTube or waste time on Facebook.

This is why we all need someone to hold us accountable. Let’s be honest, we all lack self-discipline. I know you do. That’s why you’re reading this article right now. You want to learn how to be more committed to achieving the success you want.

Dr. Gail Matthews, a professor from Dominican University conducted a study on goals and she discovered that people who write down their goals and proceed to share their weekly progress with someone tend to have a higher rate of reaching their goals.

Hence, you want to write down your goals. More importantly, you want to get someone involved and you want to send a weekly progress report to them.

When someone is monitoring our work, they tend to hold us accountable. When we know we need to report our progress to someone, our level of commitment to the work increased.

This is why it is important to get an accountability partner. It can be anyone as long as he or she is someone who supports and encourages you.

And all you need to do is to report your progress to him or her every week. When you do this, your commitment to success increased multi-fold.

Takeaway:

Get yourself an accountability partner. And then proceed to send a weekly progress report to your partner. Let your partner knows what you have done, your progress, and your new milestones to hit.

4. Develop success habits

Many of our daily work is routines. And this is why you want to turn your work and tasks into habits.

Remember this quote from Jim Rohn:

Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.

Focusing on developing success habits is like working on the system. When you perform your habits, you get the results.

Plus, when something becomes a habit, you don’t need that much willpower to execute it. Meaning, the more success habits you developed, the easier it is for you to commit to your goals and the success you want.

Most people are not committed to success because doing the work doesn’t seem fun and it can be uncomfortable to them.

But we have to face the reality. Playing games is more fun than working out in the gym. But if your goal is to get back in shape, then playing games isn’t going to help. You have to face the reality of working on the uncomfortable to get the results you want.

And when you make it a habit to exercise daily, the level of stress and challenges that come along with it will decrease.

You will eventually get used to exercising and it becomes less painful to do.

In my case, writing articles and publishing them on this blog daily is difficult and challenging. But once I got used to doing so, writing articles becomes less of a hurdle.

And now, I don’t question or doubt if I need to write articles or if I should, I just plunge myself into it and do it. It has become my habit, my second nature.

This is what you need to do too.

Transform your routine work into habits. When a behavior or an action becomes a habit, you are more likely to execute it. That’s how you can become more committed to the success you want.

Takeaway:

Identify what actions give you results and then turn them into habits. Below are some useful resources you may want to check out:

• 31 Daily Good Habits: The List that Improves the Quality of Your Life
• What Are Keystone Habits and the 7 Most Common Examples
• Read this powerful book that will change your life: Atomic Habits

5. Focus on creating small wins

If you want to stick to your plans and goals and take consistent action, you need to lower the resistance by focusing on taking small actions.

When your mission is big, unrealistic, daunting, and you can’t fail, you increase the resistance for working on the mission.

Think about it. If your goal is to write and publish a book in a month and to sell a thousand copies on the first day, it is a huge goal. Worse if you have never done it before and you have no idea how to do it.

If you do that, you are setting yourself up to fail.

I know you want to raise your commitment to success, but it has to align with your ability and circumstances.

This is why starting small is so important. You want to build small wins to grow your confidence and build up the belief that you can achieve it.

When you try to do something that is out of your reach, you will feel overwhelming and it creates paralysis that causes you to procrastinate.

However, when you start small, you are growing your confidence and slowly building your momentum.

Plus, starting small is easy.

You may not think that you can write a book. But you definitely can write 500 words a day. And if you do that, within a year, you will have written about 180,000 words, which is roughly a 300-page book.

Every big goal is achieved through small and consistent steps.

And if you want to increase your commitment, break down your goals and commit to creating small victories every day.

For instance, if you do just 5 little actions a day, in a week, you will have created 35 small actions. And in a month, you will have achieved 150 wins. In a year, you will have accomplished 1,825 small victories.

Don’t you think that is life-changing? And it all started with a small step.

Read: Why Start Small? The 5 Important Benefits of Starting Small

Takeaway:

If you want to increase your commitment, you need to focus on baby steps. Trying to tackle big tasks can overwhelm you and make you feel powerless. This is why you want to break down your big goals into smaller actionable steps that you can work on. Check out this article below:

Success Cycle: How to Leverage Small Success to Build Bigger Ones

6. Make a public commitment

Just tell people about your goals and the success you want to achieve in life. How does that make you feel?

You may think that people may laugh at your impossible goals and ridiculous success that you are aiming for, but I’m asking you to simply share your goals and dreams openly with just anyone. Share your thoughts with people who support you.

You see, when you openly talk about your goals and the success you want to pursue, you are raising your level of commitment because you are putting yourself on the line.

It takes courage to share a goal with someone else. And when you do, it makes you serious and more committed to achieving it.

I like this paragraph from TheLadders.com:

Once you become committed, your thoughts will become words. Your words will become actions. Your actions will become habits. Your habits will become your character and personality, which will produce your results and outcomes.

People don’t openly talk about their goals and dreams with others. This is because they are uncomfortable doing so.

But when you do, it liberates you. It makes you more committed and treats your goals and the success you want more seriously.

More importantly, you want to share your goals with others who are more successful than you. Why? Because they have done it and they know it is possible. Thus, they will not laugh at you or ridicule you, instead, they will support and help you achieve it.

This is why you want to surround yourself with positive and successful people. Your conversation determines your level of success.

Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Takeaway:

Just like what you did with your accountability partner, make a public commitment, and share your goals with the people who support you.

7. Burn the ships

I bet you have heard the story of how Captain Hernan Cortes won the battle and conquered the Aztec empire with just 600 men?

The first thing Cortes did after he and his men arrived in the New World was to order his men to burn down the ships they arrived in. This sent a clear message to his men – there is no turning back.

When you have no other options but to push forward, you will succeed.

And you can apply this very principle to increase your commitment to achieving the goals and success you want.

Just like what Travis Robertson wrote in his blog, “Retreat is easy when you have the option.”

This was why Cortes asked his men to burn the ships, leaving them no options to retreat.

And to boost your commitment to success, you too, must learn to burn your ‘ships’. But what are the ships that you should burn?

That, my friend, is a question worth pondering.

You have to ask yourself what is stopping you from achieving the success you want or limiting your growth.

For example, Kodak burns its ships by changing its business model from selling film products to digital services.

Similarly, the CEO of Kimberly-Clark, Darwin E. Smith made a strategic decision to sell the company’s paper mills and invest in brands like Kleenex and Huggies. At first, the media ridiculed Smith’s decision, but eventually, his decision turned out to be brilliant as the Kimberly-Clark outperformed Procter & Gamble.

This article written by Naphtali Hoff on Success.com nailed it:

There are times in our life when we need to make decisions even when we are unclear which path to travel. We gather as many facts as we can, measure the risks and then use our best judgment and the insights of others to guide us forward. Once we make our decision, we have to be willing to stick with it and not allow fear and second-guessing to derail us. Instead of focusing on the what-ifs, concentrate on the task at hand and the steps needed to be successful.

Safety nets and escape routes can protect us from pain and injury. But they also tend to reduce the effort, focus and commitment that we invest into a process. Once you have completed your discernment process, you have to be willing to burn the boats behind you and trust your inner voice to pursue your dreams. Never look back.

Sometimes, to achieve what we want, we have to take a leap of faith. Never let your fears hold you back. As Tony Robbins said, “If you want to take the island you need to burn the boats.”

Takeaway:

Identify what are the most sensible boats you can burn. Get rid of the things that stop you or prevent you from doing your best. When failure isn’t an option, you will succeed. When there is a will, there is a way.

Conclusion

When it comes to success, there are no shortcuts and there is no magic wand. And it has a lot to do with your level of commitment.

You can’t just dream about success. You have to commit to it and then do it. Follow the tips shared above to increase your commitment to success.