Longevity: Your Secret To Success

Longevity is the secret to becoming successful in any area of your life.

Building wealth, a successful career, strengthening your body and mind, and having strong relationships with loved ones can’t be achieved in a few days. These goals take a lot of time.

Determination, focus, and grit are the traits that will make you successful. Intelligence and talent are important but overrated.

In this post, I’d like to share some ideas to explain why longevity is the secret to success and help you shift your focus to staying in the game long enough to become rich in every area of your life.

10,000 Hour Rule

In his book “Outliers: The Story of Success,” Malcolm Gladwell introduced the 10,000 Hour Rule which says the key to achieving mastery in any skill is simply correct practice for at least 10,000 hours.

While 10,000 hours of practice isn’t an exact science, I strongly believe if you correctly practice one hard thing for a long enough time (try 10,000+ hours?), you will achieve results that will blow your expectations.

Practicing something for 3 hours a day, every day of the year, the 10,000 Hour Rule would imply that you achieve mastery in just under 10 years.

If you bump that to 8 hours a day, like working in your profession, that time drops to around 5 years.

“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”

Bill Gates

Looking back at experiences in my own life, I’ve noticed a strong correlation between time, effort, and growth that aligns with Gladwell’s rule.

• It took 10 years of training, learning proper nutrition, and self-education for at least 2 hours a day that built a physique I never imagined possible.

• It took 5 years of working a profession for at least 8 hours a day to feel like I had a solid grasp of my professional skills and created the confidence that I could one day practice my craft at the highest level if I wanted to.

• It took 10 years of self-education, investing, and thinking about finance for at least 2 hours a day to feel like I had a solid understanding of the financial world and made significant progress towards financial freedom.

When first starting out in any of these areas, I never knew what kind of success I could achieve. I enthusiastically dived in head first, learned from mistakes along the way, and always kept moving forward.

Little by little I made incremental progress. Small achievements along the way motivated me to keep going. Even after reaching levels that I never imagined possible, I can see clearly just how much more I can accomplish by prioritizing my longevity in all of these areas.

Take a look at the successes in your own life. How many of them align with the 10,000 Hour Rule?

Think Marathon, Not A Sprint

There’s a reason why marathon runners pace themselves throughout a race: they know if they sprint early on they will fade in the later stages of the race.

This is also true in all parts of life from your career, finances, and health. Everyone has a pace of making progress that is optimal for them. Taking action and figuring out a sustainable pace for you is crucial to winning your own race. Don’t compete in other people’s rat race.

We’re taught at a young age to get the best grades in school -> get into a top university -> get the best grades at university -> land a high-paying job -> get the best reviews at work -> get promotions and raises -> be successful.

However, at some point early on in your journey you should realize that being the best, the fastest, the smartest, etc. is no longer the most important factor in determining your success.

Do you know what is?

Longevity. Being able to continuously push forward, make progress, and not burn out.

Build The Body Of Your Dreams

Go to a gym at the beginning of the New Year and see how crowded it is. The wave of New Year’s resolutions drives gyms to max capacity.

However, a few months into the year the crowds will normalize, leaving mostly a small group of regulars who actually look fit!

These folks did not build their bodies by working out 24 hours a day for a whole month.

They started small, trained a few times a week, educated themselves on proper exercise form and nutrition, and then applied those lessons at the gym over the years.

They are the ones that are in the gym at the beginning of January but still around by the end of December.

They achieve their fitness goals because they kept on improving.

Longevity is the secret to success in your health.

Take Control Of Your Career

The same is true for high-income earners in demanding careers.

High-income earners have a unique opportunity to become multi-millionaires in their lifetimes if they can stay in the game.

Starting out, everyone wants to be a top-ranked employee, achieve faster promotions, and make more money than their peers.

However, being the best is never free. There is a price to pay.

Top-ranked employees typically work longer and harder than everyone else and make more sacrifices that impact their health and satisfaction.

No matter how young, motivated, and energetic you are, sustaining that pace forever is nearly impossible without some level of burnout.

Most people in high-stress positions are unable to sustain that pace for more than a few years, quitting for greener pastures. Those who do stick around often make great sacrifices in their health, relationships, and passions, becoming a shell of the person they once were.

A better career strategy is to optimize for longevity. Exercise daily, pursue your passions and hobbies, take real vacations, and set boundaries for people and things that are important to you.

At the same time, continue increasing the value you provide to your employer and clients, spend less than you earn, hit your optimal savings rate, and invest to buy back your time.

You do not have to be the best to have a successful career, being good enough can actually make you richer in the long run!

By doing everything in your power to stay well-rounded and healthy (mentally and physically), you will not only become richer, but happier in the process.

Sprinting too quickly out the gate will make it more likely you will burn out and quit long before you have enough time to reap massive financial success. Longevity is the secret to success in your career.

Never Lose In The Stock Market

Let’s look at another example of building wealth: long-term buy-and-hold investing in the stock market.

Finance leaders such as Warren Buffet and Jack Bogle (founder of Vanguard) believe that low-cost, diversified stock index funds are the most sensible investment for the vast majority of individual investors like you and me.

If we invested in the stock market over 1-year, 5-year, 10-year, and 20-year periods, how would we do? Let’s see below.

While returns for 1-year periods can be significantly positive or negative (want to lose 37% of your investment in 1 year?), the annualized returns across 20-year periods are all positive (from 0.5% to 13.2%)… meaning you would have never lost money if you held on.

If history has shown that it’s almost impossible to lose money over a 20+ year period, why wouldn’t you adopt a long-term investing strategy where you are almost guaranteed to win?

You make money in the stock market by regularly investing and staying invested over long periods of time. It’s very simple, but not easy… because of our behavioral mistakes.

The Best Investors Are Dead?

Fidelity is rumored to have done a study that found clients with the best investment portfolio returns either forgot about their accounts or were dead!

While the existence of the study raises questions, the results are true and point to key driving forces behind the stock market: fear and greed.

Every year, millions of investors underperform the overall stock market because they try to time the market. As shown below, the S&P 500 had returned a whopping 17,715% if invested since 1930!

To put that into perspective, every $10,000 invested would have turned into over $1.8 million with the same purchasing power (real returns adjusted for inflation) by 2020!

However, if you take out the 10 best days in the stock market during every decade, that return drops to a measly 28% (on the flip side, if you take out the 10 worst days every decade, the returns increase drastically to over 3,793,787%).

Do you think you can correctly pick 10 best days out of every 3,650 days to be in and out of the market? Can you do it consistently decade over decade? I sure hope you don’t! Because it’s not possible.

Nobody can predict what will happen in the stock market. Don’t try to time the market.

For investors who time the market, emotions drive their actions. They buy at the top (greed) and sell at the bottom (fear). The irony is by trading in and out of the market to get better returns, they actually get worse returns!

Investors who stuck with a long-term approach in their investment strategy came out ahead. They always stayed invested, took the good along with the bad days, and were rewarded with great financial returns.

Time in the market beats timing the market. Longevity is your secret to success in building wealth in the stock market.

Stay In The Game To Win

Staying in the game is your secret to winning the game.

This isn’t only a wildly effective life strategy, but a great career and wealth-maximization strategy.

Aggressively prioritizing your own physical and mental health and setting lifestyle improvement boundaries will give you the longevity to squeeze the most out of your career, both from a financial and personal satisfaction standpoint.

The reality is that with enough time, you can achieve massive success in any area by allowing your efforts, knowledge, and skills to compound. If you drop out of the game too early, you’ll never get to experience that end result.

For those who stick with it long enough, the world will see you as an overnight success. But deep down you know that it was truly years in the making that led to this moment.

Determination, focus, and grit will make you rich.

Longevity is the secret to success. Just keep marching forward.