Maximum Results. Minimum Effort.

My gym was packed today. It’s usually easy to turn up anytime and use whatever piece of equipment I want, but today there’s a queue for everything. But then it is 2nd January. Many people have bounced into 2016 full of hope and determined to make this the year different to any other. This is the year I’m going to eat less, exercise more, lose weight, be nicer to people, get that promotion, do more voluntary work, improve my house, get into a relationship, or sign up for that big charity challenge.

As usual, marketers are taking full advantage of this spike in consumer effort and hopefulness by praying on the people who want to make these changes, but with the minimum amount of effort.

Most of the TV ads I saw last night were,

• Ab toning belts – Get a flat stomach without exercising
• Lose weight - Ready made diet meals delivered to your door
• Find the person of your dreams – Dating sites where an algorithm does all the hard work
• New magazine – Guaranteed to get you that promotion you always wanted
• Furniture Sale – Buy now pay nothing until 2017. 24 Easy installments. Free delivery.

“We do the hard work so you don’t have to”.

It works every time. Just like my gym, people are signing up for new shiny things to improve their lives and unscrupulous marketers are only too happy to take their money.

People want to believe that effort is a myth, and success has more to do with being in the right place at the right time, and taking advantage of that once a year opportunity to change stuff. Tech superstar  and VC Kevin Rose recommends the best app for 2016 is "Way of Life". It's a great good app to help with new year's resolutions and it has a catchy slogan. "Spend less than 1 minute a day to change your habits".

A few years ago, management consultant Tom Peters told me that (in business anyway) there are only 3 rules to success.

1. Hustle – Work harder than everyone else.
2. Be more prepared than anyone else in the room.
3. Always have a good piece of research up your sleeve.

This is nothing new of course. Entrepreneurs such as Branson, Carnegie, Ford, Vaynerchuk and Zuckerberg have been spouting the same message for years. Hustle. Work hard. There are no shortcuts to success. But yet in marketing, we like to make everything quicker, faster, cheaper or shorter, because that’s what sells.

“It took ten years of trying to become an over-night success”. Biz Stone (Co-Founder of Twitter).

Relying on luck and believing that “everything happens for a reason” is a great manta (and to helped sell a lot of copies of The Secret), but most of the time success is directly related to effort. Once you remove the outliers who did become successful quickly and relatively effortlessly (x-factor and lottery winners, founders of social networks who exited after 2 years for millions), you are left with the people who just stuck their head down and worked hard. You don’t see many ads showing a before and after photo of the fat guy who got a six-pack in 6 weeks, 6 months later, because he put most of that weight back on when he returned to his normal routine, and his body shape went back to a more natural shape.

My point, not surprisingly, is this...

Effort takes many forms. Showing up. Knowing stuff (being smart might be the luck of the draw, but knowing stuff is the result of effort). Learning new things. Changing habits. Being kind when it’s more fun not to be. Acts of kindness that don’t require anything in return. You’ve heard these things a hundred times before of course, but in January 2016 it seems easier to remain hopeful and bet on luck.

Once you remove the outliers and realise you are probably not going to win the X-factor, the Apprentice, get ￡1m for your new idea from an angel (investor), we find ourselves in a better place. In many cases we have been tricked by those few lucky people on the top of the pile, who write get rich / lose weight fast books, and appear on daytime TV telling us how we can do it too. Of course these things don’t work for us just because they worked for someone else.

Michael Jordan’s person trainer is a tough guy called Tim Grover who has trained many superstar athletes such as Kobe and Dwayne Wade and Navy SEALS. In this book Relentless he explains the secret to their success:

• Believe this: Everything you need is already inside you.
• Here’s my process ~ [Decide. Commit. Act. Succeed. Repeat].
• Anything that requires a long explanation probably isn't the truth.
• You can read clever motivation slogans all day and still have no idea how to get to where you want to be.
• Excellence is lonely.
• Bottom line if you want success of any kind: you have to be comfortable being uncomfortable.
• Don't tell me the glass is half-full or half-empty; you either have something in that glass or you don't.
• Success isn't the same as talent. The world is full of incredibly talented people who never succeed at anything. 

“Don't tell me about a workout that's ‘easy’ and done in ‘the comfort of your own home’. Any workouts involving comfort aren't workouts. They're insults. You can work out at home, but if whatever you are doing makes you feel ‘comfortable,’ something is very wrong”. Tim Grover

I was sacked from Phones 4U years ago, for effectively sharing our successes publicly. The board (wrongly) assumed that me telling other brands how we became so successful would mean that our competitors could steal our strategies and ideas and gain a share of our market. I tried to explain that everyone who reads Richard Branson’s book doesn’t become a millionaire. They didn’t agree. I left. When things didn’t turn out too well for Phones 4U in the end, I wasn’t hugely surprised.

The thing is, we see people who seem to fly by effortlessly, who seem to get so much more than we think they deserve, and it’s easy to forget that:

A: These guys are the exceptions*.

B. There’s nothing you can do about it anyway

* Jobs, Gates and Zuckerberg all dropped out of college and became billionaires, but they are outliers. It's highly likely that if you drop out of college, you won't get a job.

This is the key to the paradox of effort: while luck may be more appealing than effort, you don’t get to choose luck. Effort, on the other hand, is totally available, all the time.

This is a hard sell.

Diet books that say, “eat less, exercise more” may work but they don’t sell many copies.

So, with that short rant over, I would like to offer some advice as we jump head first into 2016 determined to make this year count. You can go through the list and decide which pieces might work for you, but it’s a good start. I managed to read one business book a week in 2015 but as I looked back and wondered how I did it, I worked out that I posted 70% less content on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. I don’t think my friends, my network or my job suffered too much, but it put my head in a much better place for sure.

1. Delete 90 minutes of “spare time” every day by watching less TV, reading less trashy magazines, posting less on social media, only visiting websites that you don’t need to delete from your browser history, commuting or going to unnecessary meetings.
2. Spend the 90 minutes doing other stuff instead:

• Exercise for 20-30 minutes in the gym.
• Read relevant non-fiction books, journals and blogs.
• Read those important research papers (and take notes) instead of just sharing, liking or RT them.
• Send (hand-written) thank you notes to people.
• Learn a new language (French, Chinese, HTML, Ruby, Python, C++)
• Volunteer (start a Coderdojo?)
• Blog about stuff you’ve learned (even if nobody reads it).
• Give a public presentation once a month about a topic you currently don’t know much about.
• Spend at least one day a week doing absolutely nothing but being with people you love.
• For 2016, try spending money only on stuff you absolutely need to get by. Save the rest of your money, relentlessly. Give away 10% if you can to a cause that inspires you.

I am writing this as much for myself as I am for you. I thank you for taking the time to read this, but I reckon that if we could show how manage to pull this off, 12 months from now we would be the fittest, most well-rested, intelligent, best-funded and most motivated person we’ve ever been. We would know stuff other people don’t know, we’d have wider networks and we’d be more focused than we’ve ever been. We might even get that promotion and be recognized as being on the best in our industry at doing what we do.

It’s entirely possible that this effort won’t be sufficient and we will still need to be lucky. Even CEO Travis Kalanick claims that 30% of Uber’s product strategy is “magic”.

And that’s why I love what golf legend Gary Player said a few years back, “the harder you work, the luckier you get”.

[Thanks to Seth Godin for inspiring this post and some of the quotes. I am currently reading “Whatcha Gonna do With That Duck? I highly recommend it].