By Dan Remon · Evidence checked October 2026
Success advice is easy to agree with and hard to run on a Tuesday.
I first published this list a few years ago. The 5 strategies still hold. What the first version lacked was a way to make them stick when you’re tired, travelling or behind.
Here are the 5, what the research says about each, and the 4-mode loop I use to install them one at a time.
What are personal success strategies?
Personal success strategies are the ways of thinking and working that move you towards a result you’ve chosen, in any field. The 5 I come back to are: get out of your comfort zone on purpose, know exactly where you’re going, find mentors, study and follow what has already worked for others, and be ready to be wrong. None of them is new. What decides whether they work is installation. Put them in one at a time, check them every week and keep each one until it runs without a reminder. The 4-mode loop further down is how I do that.
Strategy 1: get out of your comfort zone
Staying in your comfort zone usually means accepting second best: average performance and the status quo, dressed up as stability. Growth sits on the other side of the discomfort. Hard problems force you to dig for better solutions, and the knockdowns teach lessons you don’t get any other way, as long as you get back up.
There’s research behind treating discomfort as useful. In 5 experiments with 2,163 adults, Kaitlin Woolley and Ayelet Fishbach tested what happens when people seek out discomfort as a sign they’re growing, in areas such as improvisation classes to build confidence and expressive writing about difficult emotions. Compared with standard instructions, seeking discomfort increased engagement and how far people felt they had achieved their goals. The effect only showed up where the growth came with immediate discomfort.1
So I use discomfort as a signal, never as a goal in itself. Each week, pick one task you’ve been avoiding that moves something you care about: the hard conversation, the price increase, the training session that tests you. Do it first, before the day has a chance to talk you out of it.
Strategy 2: know where you’re going
Without a destination you’re busy without direction. Knowing exactly what you want tells you what to plan, what to say no to and what to measure.
Specific beats vague. In 2002, Edwin Locke and Gary Latham summarised 35 years of goal research: specific, difficult goals consistently led to higher performance than urging people to do their best, with effect sizes in meta-analyses ranging from 0.42 to 0.80. Their explanation is simple. A do-your-best goal has no external reference point, so almost any result can pass as your best.2
Most people know the SMART model. Over the years I added to it and called the result the SMARTer goal system. The main change was making the action plan part of the goal, because the plan is the part people skip once the goal is written. Today I set 3 outcomes for 90 days, each with weekly inputs booked in the calendar. The full method is in goal setting that survives the quarter.
Strategy 3: find mentors
Success leaves clues. Whatever you’re building, someone has built something close to it before. A good mentor lets you borrow their experience: the mistakes they’ve already paid for, how they think and the processes that worked. Look for people in your field who have already made it, failed along the way and spent years getting there.
The research is supportive but modest. A 2008 meta-analysis by Lillian Eby and colleagues covered 112 studies of youth, academic and workplace mentoring. Mentoring was linked with better outcomes across behaviour, attitudes, health, relationships, motivation and careers, but the effects were generally small, and larger for academic and workplace mentoring than for youth mentoring.3 The authors point out that many of the studies were correlational, so the results don’t prove that mentoring causes those outcomes.
Small average effects mean a mentor is no guarantee. Who you pick, and how you use them, decides what you get. Good mentors, like good coaches, don’t tell you what to do. They ask specific questions that help you find your own answers. Go in with your questions written down. Expect to pay for the best ones, in money or in time, and treat it as an investment in a shorter learning curve. If you want someone to build the system with you week by week, that’s coaching, which I cover in performance coaching: what it is and when you need it.
Strategy 4: follow success
Success is a system, and the people who’ve got where you want to go have left a record of theirs. Lay their methods side by side and the same patterns keep showing up.
Start by defining what success means for you, in numbers where you can. Then find 3 people who have reached that point and study what they did every week rather than what they say in interviews. Look for the repeated inputs: how they plan, how they train, how they make decisions and what they refuse to do.
You can’t copy someone’s exit. You can copy their Monday morning. Run one of their habits for a full 28 days before you decide it doesn’t suit you, and only then start adapting it.
Strategy 5: be ready to be wrong
Nobody is right all the time. Experience makes you right more often, and it also makes it easier to stop listening. Stay open to other people’s advice and to better ways of reaching the same outcome. You don’t know what you don’t know.
Being ready to be wrong means asking for feedback and using it, which takes some care. In a 1996 meta-analysis of 607 effect sizes, Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi found that feedback improved performance on average (d = 0.41), but more than a third of feedback interventions made performance worse. Feedback worked less well the more it pulled attention towards the self and away from the task.4 Locke and Latham found the other side of it: goals plus feedback work better than goals alone.2
Feedback, not failure. Keep feedback about the task and the system: what happened, what broke the plan and what changes next week. Leave the verdict on you out of it. That’s the job of the Friday Debrief, 15 minutes at the end of the week, and it’s where being wrong becomes useful. For the belief side of this, see mindset for leaders: standards beat motivation.
How to install them: the 4-mode loop
A list of 5 strategies is still a list. To make them run, I use the loop inside the Stealth OS: Audit, Install, Execute, Compound. One strategy goes through it at a time.
Audit: find the weakest strategy
Score yourself from 1 to 10 on each of the 5, based on what you did in the last 4 weeks rather than what you intended. The lowest score is where you start. For a wider read on where your system is leaking, take the 1% Scorecard.
Install: one Monthly Lever
Turn the weakest strategy into one specific change for a 28-day cycle, the Monthly Lever. For mentors, that might be one conversation every 2 weeks with someone 10 years ahead of you. For the comfort zone, one avoided task done first thing every Monday. One lever per cycle. Start all 5 at once and the first hard week takes them all out.
Execute: the weekly rhythm
The lever goes into the week through the Weekly Compass, 30 minutes to plan and block the week before the inbox opens. Each day, the Stealth Tracker records whether it happened in a 60-second check-in. On Friday, the 15-minute Friday Debrief checks what moved and what changes next week. The whole rhythm is in a productivity system that survives a bad week.
Compound: let it build
Hold the lever until it runs without a reminder, then bring the next strategy through the loop. That’s The 1% Compound. Improve by 1% a day for a year and you finish at 37.78 times your starting point, because 1.01 to the power of 365 is 37.78. Slip by 1% a day and you finish at 0.03. Nobody improves at a steady 1% a day. The arithmetic shows direction: small changes held long enough go a long way, and so does neglect.
How to start
Start with where you are, then choose the level of support.
- The 1% Scorecard. 8 questions, 2 minutes, free. You get a score out of 100 and the one thing to install first.
- The Quest. The performance membership that runs this loop in 28-day cycles, with a room of founders and executives installing one lever at a time alongside you. Cancel anytime.
Pick the weakest of the 5 and run it for 28 days before you touch the next.
Related reading: 10 moves for a better life you can start this week, how to run a personal annual review and 10 signs you have a limited mindset, and how to change it.
FAQ
What are the most important strategies for personal success?
Specific, difficult goals backed by regular feedback on progress have the most research behind them. Add mentors who have done what you’re trying to do, the habit of doing uncomfortable work first and a willingness to be wrong. Install them one at a time so they last.
How do you get out of your comfort zone?
Pick one task a week that you’ve been avoiding and that moves something you care about, and do it first in the day. In 5 experiments, people who sought out discomfort as a sign of growth engaged more with hard personal-growth tasks than people given standard instructions. Raise the bar a little each cycle.
Do you need a mentor to be successful?
No, but a good one shortens the learning curve. A 2008 meta-analysis of 112 studies linked mentoring with better outcomes, though the effects were generally small and many of the studies were correlational. Pick mentors who have done what you want to do and bring specific questions.
How do you define personal success?
Write down what you want your work, health and life outside work to look like in 3 years, in terms you could measure. Then set one 90-day outcome in each area that moves you towards it. If you can’t measure it, you can’t tell whether you’re getting closer.
Sources
- Woolley, K., & Fishbach, A. (2022). Motivating personal growth by seeking discomfort. Psychological Science, 33(4), 510-523. doi.org/10.1177/09567976211044685
- Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705-717. doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.57.9.705
- Eby, L. T., Allen, T. D., Evans, S. C., Ng, T., & Dubois, D. (2008). Does mentoring matter? A multidisciplinary meta-analysis comparing mentored and non-mentored individuals. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 72(2), 254-267. doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2007.04.005
- Kluger, A. N., & DeNisi, A. (1996). The effects of feedback interventions on performance: A historical review, a meta-analysis, and a preliminary feedback intervention theory. Psychological Bulletin, 119(2), 254-284. doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.119.2.254
This article is general information, not medical advice.
