Four Keys to Success (Part 1)

Hello, I'm Kevin Bennett. I am always looking for success-minded people to share Ideas with and talk about success strategies. Here is my latest concept called the * Four Golden Keys to Success. *
.
Golden Key #1 - * Long Term Consistency *
.
If you do something for a week and quit, no matter what field you are in, you are definitely going to fail. You are going to have to put some time in. To get a frame of reference, I would think of this as how many weeks per year of high performance work you are spending on your endeavor. Keywords being "high performance."
.
My theory is that there is nothing wrong with reasonable rest and vacation time. So if you have 40 to 45 weeks per year of high performance work, you are doing very good. 30 to 35 or less, probably just kidding yourself.
.
Let's say you are already a millionaire and a smashing success in your field. You may be able to coast by on 20 weeks per year since you have built up so much momentum. But for people starting out, you are really going to have to apply some elbow grease.
.
Speaking of momentum, this is one of the main reasons long term consistency is so important. Let's say you spend a month working up a Mozart sonata on piano. You are making progress and the piece sounds good. You have learned the entire piece so you are very satisfied with yourself. Now you decide to move on to basket weaving. You essentially blow off the piano playing and get into your basket weaving full time. Then after a couple months of this you decide to dabble in guitar a little bit. You get a guitar and start plunking away for a month but you find that playing chords on a K-Mart special really irritates your finger tips.
.
Suddenly one day, you remember how much fun you had playing that Mozart Sonata on piano and you throw down the baskets and K-Mart guitar and jump back on the piano. Very quickly, however, you realize you have forgotten many of the riffs and you are playing very badly. So you have to spend a few days re-learning the sonata and finally in about a week, you can play it almost as good as you used to.
.
What's happened is you have lost momentum. So now you are having to spend more time to go back and re-learn rather than learning something new. If you had even played the sonata a few times per week, you could have kept it fresh and added a second or even third sonata by now. You could have did some basket weaving or guitar playing on the side as long as you kept up your piano skills as the top priority.
.
How many things can you do? I would say the key is not how many things you do, it's making sure you have at least one thing that you apply the four keys of success to. I don't care if you do 10 other hobbies on the side as long as you are great at at least one thing. In the movie "City Slickers" they talked about this "one thing" theory. You can add other things (hobbies and endeavors) as long as you do not sacrifice your "one thing".
.
I would love to hear your comments and your own ideas! Thanks, Kevin Bennett