Let us open with a sentence that makes sense: success is not a peak experience. It is a sustained condition.
So with all due respect to your fantasies of standing in the spotlights with a prestigious prize in your hands and the applause of the crowd filling the background, success is far more closely related to resilience, and to creating a stable routine that produces good results consistently.
And hidden inside that tedious sentence is one of the factors that neatly and effectively ruins your chances: your inability to live with a state in which nothing significant is happening.
A feature film arrives at its point and its catharsis within two hours. A sitcom gives you half an hour of foreplay at most before delivering the happy ending.
But a career or a business in the real world of earth and sand and sky? Change down a gear. Here we are talking about a different game with different rules.
Two key words worth absorbing into the veins: patience and boredom.
Let us start with boredom.
Success in any complex project — including a relationship, incidentally — involves a great mass of grey moments, routine actions that repeat endlessly, and we recoil from the possibility of being bored.
And if you belong to the party that intends to succeed in life, that is a serious problem.
Because a genuinely significant achievement is one composed of an enormous number of tasks — and a good many of them are dull.
Want to boast about studying law at the most prestigious university? You have to grind through the entrance exams. Want to be a psychologist peering into the innards of humanity? You have to get through at least five courses in statistics. Want to invest and make a great deal of money? You will have to learn to read graphs and perform technical and mathematical analyses of share behaviour until you feel the floor of your brain leaking.
You set out to collect the great prize the self-realisation merchants promised you, and you discover repeatedly that you are wading through something interminable.
That is not a sign that you have chosen wrongly. It is what the middle of everything looks like, and the ability to remain in it without requiring the situation to feel meaningful is the single most reliable predictor of who finishes.