Many of us are frightened of change. We feel that it has negative connotations. When we see that the opposite is true, we can free ourselves.

If there is one thing that separates children from adults it is that children love change and adults tend to fear it—or are at least apprehensive of it. Children are always excited by new things, and are always willing to experiment with stuff. This can be anything from inventing a new game out of nothing to going to new places. Their lives are in a state of constant change and they experience wonder because of it.

But as we get older, we begin to lose this love of change and try to keep away from change as much as possible. We try to keep things the same in all areas of our lives. This can be fine in some areas, such as wanting to keep hold of a wonderful house that we live in, or to make sure that our bank balance stays at a healthy level – or even better rises through the years.  But in many cases, this apprehensiveness about change is not a good thing.  It can hold us back from many things – such as making change in areas of our life that really need it. We turn down a new job because we're not sure if we will like it’s not.  We shy away from making new friends because we’re not sure how the relationship will turn out.  The worst thing is when we stop looking for new things altogether.  In short, we give up our dreams, or fail to make new ones that can motivate us to change ourselves.

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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.

Do you need a huge stretch of time in order to make inroads into a project? Not at all. With a change of thinking, you can make small steps—and your time management can improve by leaps and bounds…

Have you ever seen a young child begin to play? Or, more exactly, have you ever seen a young child think about beginning to play, and wondering whether there is enough time available to produce something of value. I haven’t. The fact is that young children don’t think about things too deeply before beginning an activity. They just do. And they can begin at any time of day, and—as anyone with children can attest to—especially when it’s close to bedtime.

It’s a great thing to be able just to get down and do something without worrying whether we have time to finish it or even achieve anything at all. But adults tend to think this facility is only for playing, for messing about, not for something serious like “work”.

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When trying to achieve something, we usually think of moving ahead quickly. We think of moving in a straight line. This is not always the best way to get where we want to go.

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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Many people think of success in terms of winning, and of being the best. This is not necessarily so—and thinking so can be damaging to our personal development.

One of the things that can hold us back from success is a misunderstanding of the word “success” itself. It’s a subjective word which has strong connotations of perfection—which is in itself a subjective word—and of being the “best” at something. It also conjures up images related to “winning”. When we think of success we tend to think of someone holding a cup aloft after beating everyone in a tennis or golf tournament.

But is this really success?

Not necessarily.

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