The secret to my success

Back when I was younger and standing on triathlon race podiums regularly, people used to ask me how I did it. While I was in decent shape, I don’t look like the typical triathlete. My gear budget was smaller and my equipment was older than what many of my competitors used. My diet wasn’t particularly disciplined (Then, as now, I have a soft spot for excess carbohydrates.) I used to shrug and explain that anybody could do it. I knew I was doing anything special, but I couldn’t articulate it. Only as I got older did understand what separated me from the competition.

The secret to my success? Patience and consistency. I trained every day. I got up, I did the prescribed workout, and then went about my day. And the next day? I did it again. And again. Every workout was designed to build me towards race day, but they were never so strenuous that I couldn’t execute the next day’s workout. I understood that there wasn’t a single day, or a single workout that would be the golden ticket that put me on the podium. It was the steady buildup of many sessions over time that gave me the strength, endurance, and confidence to execute on race day.

This translates to the working world very easily, and especially anything related to building up new business. It has to be a combination of patience and consistency. There’s no one single person or conversation that’s going to help grow your business, no one blog post that’s going to make your web site explode, no one tweet that’s going to land you with a million followers.

You need to execute every single day if you want to grow your business. That means making calls, sending emails, creating content, and working hard to add value. What is the appropriate volume for all of this activity? The answer is “however much you can do and still be excited to do it again tomorrow.” As GaryVee says, “Macro patience and micro speed.”

The good news is this isn’t some super-secret formula that I discovered by accident. To paraphrase Thomas Edison, “[Success] is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

PS: I had to dig those medals and trophies out of a box buried in the basement for the picture. They are not on permanent display at the Horowitz household. I know that past success has no impact on current execution. (Also, my wife says they don’t match the decor.)