There is no one successful person who doesn’t say that success is not a straight line. No matter who you are, you are going to go through bumps in the road. There’s always going to be turbulence along the way because you don’t control the results. You are going to win some and lose some.
Success will always be two steps forward and one step back. That one step back is crucial. It not only makes your progress normal, it humbles your ego. Just when you think you’re not going to lose is when you lose and feel invincible. This is when Murphy’s law is the most applicable. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
The frequent “one step back” moments are what keeps people from charging ahead and moving forward. They don’t want to feel the sting and the hurt of that moment so they stop putting in effort. When all they literally have to do is continue to put in that effort in order to get to the finish line.
Success is not a straight line. One day, you will make progress and on some days you won’t. It’s when you see continuous progress when looking at the big picture that matters. For example, when you see the stock market, specifically the S&P 500, even the 07-08 financial crisis looks really cute.
That’s when people thought the world was imploding and was ending. If you started investing since 1967 and kept till ’07 – ’08, you were yawning at how boring the stock market movement is. However, too many people focus on the short term and give up if they see a recent large decline in the stock market.
They notice the drop of failure to an ocean of success. That’s backwards thinking.
Why Success is Not a Straight Line
One reason why success is not a straight line is because you’re not SLAPPING that social share button and posting to your favorite social media! If you don’t want to do it for anyone else, please do it for me. Not only can your friends learn to pick themselves up after a failure, it helps motivate me to put out even more content for you guys!
I try to breed successful and future millionaires and if making money and helping others make money is your thing, please give that social share button a good slap. I really appreciate it.
So let’s get into the reasons that success is not linear.
1) You Don’t Control the Results
If it were up to you, today would always be better than yesterday and tomorrow will always be better than today. However, you don’t control the results. With globalization, the world is more connected than ever. Therefore, other people’s actions determine your results. You can put in enormous effort to influence the results.
However, you will never control the results. That would be you acting as both the competitor and the judge, which doesn’t make sense. You would give yourself whatever results you want to give yourself and not the results that you earned. That’s not right. It’s a good thing success is not a straight line because you don’t control the results.
Is that a bad thing? No. When you focus on what you control, effort, instead of what you don’t control is when your mind frees up. You don’t worry about the less important things in life, you worry about the important things. It leaves room for you to focus on them, what great news.
2) Failure Exists
If success exists, then failure will always exist alongside it. Love can’t exist without hate and good can’t exist without bad. Both have to exist. When both have to exist, then that means failure is a good thing. What does that mean for you? Since failure exists, by definition, success is not a straight line to the top.
It’s not linear. Successes have to be accompanied by failure at some point. There is no one who got to success by winning every battle. Everyone got to success by winning a higher number of times than failure. The next time you fail, accept that it’s a part of the process, stop caring, and move on with life. It’s nothing special.
You failed yesterday, failed today, and are going to fail tomorrow. And that is wonderful news. It means you are taking chances and putting yourself in a position to either succeed or fail. Do that more times and the more times you will have that one win that propels you to overwhelming success. One win is all it takes.
3) Something Always Comes Up
Success is not a straight line because there’s other priorities in life. You think you’re making great progress building your career. Then you find out your college best friend is marrying. So you attend their wedding and give up a couple of days, or even a week, to be there for your friend.
No matter what, something always comes up. And that’s OK. There are other priorities in life than becoming the most successful person you are going to be, whatever your definition of success is. I’m attending a friend’s wedding in the first week of December 2021 and I couldn’t be more stoked for that event.
Will that set me back a couple of days? Absolutely. Do I care? Absolutely not. Something’s always going to come up in your life as well. Some things are more important than money so you need to tend to other areas of your life as well. I generally do not support task switching but sometimes, it’s necessary.
4) Your Priorities Change Every Day
Speaking of something always coming up, the definition of success will be a moving target to you. There are general long term goals that you shoot for. But the every day short term goals necessary to achieve those long term goals will change throughout time for you. Your long term goal could be to start a successful business.
Then Hurricane Ida hits you and you have no choice but to focus on evacuating for the week, possibly two. Success is not a straight line because every day priorities change. Life comes at you fast and throws you curveballs you didn’t ever anticipate ever being thrown.
As long as your general choices are moving you towards the right path, you’re doing just fine. Day to day priorities change every day and there’s nothing wrong with that. Things like laundry, going to the grocery store, car maintenance, and more will throw you off your schedule often. And that’s OK.
So Then, What is a Path to Success?
The path to success is a squiggly line filled with many bumps in the road, water traps, booby traps, and opponents from all circles of life. That is wonderful, it not only keeps life interesting, it challenges you to grow as a person to adapt to your changing environment. That is the right path for you to take.
If there is an easy path to success, then by all means, unapologetically take the easy way out. However, it’s a rule that success is not a straight line. Linear and easy ways are not going to present themselves to you. It’s even hard, if not impossible, to find the linear path to success in the first place.
Therefore, you could save a lot of time just by taking the presented path and moving on. The cost to find the easy path could be greater than the reward and it may not even be worth it by the end. By now, I thought that I would be retired from my job and working on my own business.
Why did I think that? I modeled out a linear path to success. I did the math based on my $107,000 salary, savings rate, spending, and stock market appreciation. However, the stock market did not appreciate as I expected and in a linear fashion. It was completely and utterly beyond my control.
Therefore, I accepted that realizing my dreams will take a couple more years before I reap what I sow. Life throws many curveballs that I didn’t anticipate like the coronavirus and that is just fine by me. I’m still young and patiently waiting a couple more years is not going to matter in the long run.
I will keep all of my future plans transparent with this blog, of course.
How do You Find Your Success Path?
Even though there are no actual guarantees in life, the most guaranteed way to finish the success path is to put in effort every day. Some days, that effort will be for nothing and set you back some. Some days it transports you to another dimensional level of success. The common link is that you always put in your effort almost every day.
Success is not a straight line but your effort is a straight line because you control it. You don’t control how others receive your effort but you control how you exert your effort. Even if it’s hard at times, make a promise to yourself and to me that you will keep showing up and putting in the effort.
Even if you don’t think it’s going to work out by the end, keep putting in the effort. When you are losing hope is when you should be putting in the most effort. As a minority, I knew I had to put in 120% effort in order to get 100% of what the majority enjoy. I accepted that as fact and it’s worked well so far.
It’s because I kept putting in the effort where others wouldn’t. I put in the effort to save and invest as much as I possibly could instead of spending it all after graduation. I put in the extra hours in the library during school while my friends were partying and living it up.
On weekends, I work on side hustle projects to bring me more side income. There’s much more that I want to accomplish by year’s end and I’m putting in that effort. Because success is not linear, it’s not huge results so far. However, it’s a good start.
Success is Not a Straight Line So Quitters are Common
That’s what’s great about everything. Success is not a straight line so as soon as there’s any sign of trouble, people give up. Their expectations are completely and utterly mismatched with reality. They think about what they’re sacrificing all of their 20’s for when their whole lives are ahead of them.
While it’s true, it’s not the correct line of thinking.
That’s where you can swoop in and take their place. They gladly gave up that spot for you so that you can claim it as its rightful owner. Because you already accepted that failure is just a part of the journey and nothing special, you brush it off. Then you keep going, over and over again without fail.
When you finally make it, the quitters then jealously call you an overnight success. You’re not offended. You ignore them and live life as if nothing happened. It’s other people’s opinions, not fact. Other people’s opinions of you from people you don’t care about are factually worthless. It’s your opinions of yourself that matter the most.
Don’t be a casualty of the squiggly line to success. Be the victor of it. Success is not a straight line and that could either help you or hurt you. The choice is all up to you at the end of the day. There were so many times that I wanted to quit in my Financial Independence, Retire Early journey.
There were days that I made $10,000 in a single week! More money than I’ve ever made in my entire life! Then the following week I would lose $8,000. More money than I’ve ever lost in a week in my entire life. It’s a good thing that I’m stubborn that I didn’t quit. Which I thank my past self for.
It’s Great that Success is Not a Straight Line
So now that you know that success is not a straight line, it’s your choice. Will you wilt under criticism and pressure or will you fight them and come out ahead by the end? Are you going to complain about how hard it is or are you going to literally not care and keep putting in the effort?
Why it’s so great that success is not a straight line is because it separates the winners from the losers. It’s literally up to you to decide if you want to be a winner or a loser. You control this decision and nobody else. It’s not that the best you can do is only to influence the outcome. You are literally the controller of the outcome in this situation.
You don’t need to watch numerous hyped up “motivational videos” to get you to success. All you need to do is continuously put in the effort week in and week out to reap the benefits. Don’t let emotions get in the way. People used to say to me, “WOW! You max out your 401k every year?” As if that’s some magical feat.
To me, I just max out my 401k without fail like clockwork. it doesn’t matter or mean anything to me. I completely lost the ability to feel good or bad about my retirement account investment contribution habits. And that’s how you should be. Like a well oiled machine and automate things where necessary and leave emotions out of it.
Success is not a straight line so emotions have the highest potential to interfere with your progress. The more emotions you leave out of the process the better off you are.
