Part of the art of achieving success is to get rid of things which aren’t bringing you success, to get rid of the things that hold you back. It sounds simple, and it is. But perhaps because of that, we often we never think of doing it.

Many things in life, and become complicated only because we don’t get rid of the stuff that is complicated in favor of the simple. If that doesn’t sound too much of a simple truism, then think how many times you’ve found that the solution to a problem was not to keep doing more, but to do less. What happens is that we get so stuck on trying to solve a problem or trying to get things done to achieve the success we want that we lose sight of the fact that we aren’t moving forward. We’re doing a lot of ineffective things which take up huge amounts of our time and stopping us doing the good stuff.

I once saw a French chef make a consommé and I was struck by how much time he took with the process in order to make the broth as clear as possible. Consomme is a clear broth, or stock, and in order to clarify it, egg whites are added to the stock, which then absorb the impurities before being strained off. Usually one addition of egg white is enough to clear the broth, but this chef went back several times, clearing the consommé of impurities and then adding more egg white to continue the clarifying process.

What has this got to do with achieving success? Well, having the tenacity to do a job thoroughly and very well is one thing, I suppose. But in many ways it could be seen as a metaphor of how we can improve performance to an optimal level. That chef wasn’t satisfied with getting rid of just the basic impurities. He went back again and again until that broth was as clear and as perfect as it could be. And we should do the same with our lives.

Clean up your life

The impurities in the consommé are like the impurities in our life. Not impurities in the moral sense, but just thing that aren’t working, that aren’t enabling us to work at an optimal level and move forward with our lives. It means taking a good look at what is holding us back, or things that we spend time on that have very little if any beneficial effect for us, and cutting them right out of our lives, or at least cutting them back. Very often we find that things which take a lot of our time—the impurities—are the least effective in helping us move to the success we want

For instance, the habit of watching TV isn’t helping you move forward at all. In fact, after a bout of TV watching you probably feel lethargic and demotivated. The simple act of sitting there allowing your brain to be spoon-fed a series of images and sound is enough to mentally put you to sleep. It's an impurity that needs to be filtered out, so you should do just that. Once you cut out these impurities in your life, the things that destroy your motivation or take up too much of your time without enabling you to move forward toward success, you’ll find that life becomes simpler and easier. You’ll be concentrating on what works.

Kill the bad habits

These impurities can take the form of bad habits—like watching TV—or bad relationships and bad jobs. The sooner you can get rid of them, the better. Then success in whatever you want will be much easier to achieve.

Of course, in order to know what is and is not working we need to watch ourselves. We need to take a good look at the impurities in our lives before we can make a decision to cut them out. But once we have only the good stuff, we can begin to work at a much more optimal level.

This isn’t to say that this is easy. It takes a shift in our thinking away from the natural inclination to make things more complicated, to create complex systems we can be proud of. To quote Einstein: "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction."

But just bear in mind anything that requires absolutely no effort is usually ineffective wishful thinking. Despite the difficulties in getting rid of the things that don’t work, it’s still worth the effort because the rewards are great.

The next time you find yourself not progressing toward that goal, the next time you feel success is becoming more elusive, think about a great French chef making a great consommé. Go back again and again and gradually cut out everything that doesn’t move you forward. Do it today. Make a list of just a few things that have been causing you annoyance and stalling your progress. Then work on cutting them out. You’ll feel better for it.

When we want to manage our time to achieve a goal we usually see it in terms of allocating blocks of time in order to move from A to B and then to C. This has its place in time management thinking, but it isn’t always true…

When we think of achieving a goal we often think of it in terms of building blocks. We have a goal to achieve, and in order to achieve the goal we have to do A, then B, then C etc. When all the blocks are in place, we have achieved the goal. You could think of it in terms of building a house. First you put down the foundations, and then build the walls and roof. And finally you put in the doors and windows, and maybe plant a few trees in the garden.

When all this is done, you can stand back and say you have achieved your goal. The house has been built, brick by brick.

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When we think of how to manage our time effectively we often think that we should try to get more done in the time available. This is missing one of the most simple and under-used time management skills

Human beings do like to complicate things. Even when the solution is apparent, many people will continue to do the opposite, even when they often repeat the solution to themselves every minute of the day.

What do I mean?

This…

We constantly find that we don’t have time to do everything we need to get done. “I don’t have the time…” is the sentence we repeat to ourselves almost like a mantra. In order to make time we try to organize our time more effectively, usually by doing things—or at least trying to do things—faster. Then when this approach fails we go back to looking at the list of things we need to do and banging our head against the wall as we try to squeeze more hours out of the day.

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Getting down to work means getting down to work—with the word “work” being the operative word. Here’s one of many elementary motivational strategies which show you how to get into the work quickly and start being productive without falling prey to window gazing.

One of the ways of getting more done is to jump into a project whenever you have some spare time and work on the project—even if you can do only a little. These short bursts of effort can make for substantial progress in a project and are an effective part of the time management arsenal. But what is often difficult—and this applies regardless of the time available—is actually getting “into” the work.

We know that once the work begins to flow, once we get into our stride, we can make a lot of progress. But just how do we get into our stride in the first place? We’ve all had the experience of sitting down to work in the morning, filled with good intentions, only to find ourselves staring at a blank sheet of paper for a few minutes… which stretches into another few minutes… and then after a bit of cursory doodling we find we’ve been at work for almost an hour and achieved nothing.

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When we are faced with trying to get something done we usually try to take the most direct route. After all, common sense tells us the fastest route is the most direct.  For instance, say we are starting out on a journey.  We need to get from A to D, so we try to plan a route that goes directly to D. But what happens if we don’t know the direct route to D?  In that case, we have to get out a map and plan the route before setting off. 

This takes time and, no matter how good the map is, we still can’t be sure if that route is the best.  It’s only once we’ve traveled the route that we know whether or not it really is the best.  We may start on a journey and then find that there are things we couldn’t see on the map.  If we are in a car, for instance, we might find that the route we’ve chosen is extremely busy with traffic.  We might make slow progress.  In this case we might find that the direct route is not particularly fast after all.

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