#120 The Unattractive Secret to Success

Rachel Denning (00:00.814)
Hey, my friends. Good morning. Welcome to another episode of the extraordinary family life podcast. Today, we are going to talk about the unattractive secret to success. And it's actually one of the greatest ironies in life. As I've noticed, I've noticed this for years and years and years, and it just has struck me with so much force and power recently, just how important this is and

And as we reflect back on our lives, we'll see like, yeah, man, this one thing is like, it changed everything for us. So here it is. I'm just gonna come out and say it. Ready? It's repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition is the mother of mastery, right? It is the birthplace of skill.

and the absolute key to success. But here is the greatest irony. You and I, most of us and people I work with, I've done it myself, I experienced it all the time. People I work with all around the world. We do something and we do it once or maybe even twice and then we're like, yeah, I've done that. And we wanna just stop, right? How often have you heard something or...

You know, seen something or read something and when the opportunity to do it again comes up, the automatic thought is, well, I've heard that already. I've read that before. Right? And we stop. It's incredible. I recently heard this story where Tony Robbins was, this was years ago. Tony Robbins, like almost 40 years ago, right? Tony Robbins was being mentored by Jim Rohn. And...

And he went to him and he said, hey, you know, I'm still broke. Like, I don't have any money. And he's like, well, have you, Jim Rohn says to him, have you read Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill? And, you know, Tony was so excited. He's like, yeah, yeah, I've read that.

Rachel Denning (02:18.862)
And you know, thinking like, oh, I'm going to impress him because he was young at the time. He's like, I want to impress him. And he's like, he just stopped. And he's like, well, how many times? And Tony Johnson's won. Once like, what do you mean? How many times I read the book now I'm done. Right. And this is where most of us get into trouble because we do that. We'll read the book. We'll hear the podcast episode. We'll watch the video.

will do that thing and we think, yeah, I did it. And I think that's where the greatest irony is and where we fall short from our potential. Can I be so bold as to say that I believe all of us, you included, are leaving potential on the table. You're leaving greatness just sitting right there when you really could just totally.

crush it. You could be living at an entirely different level than you are, but you're stuck right where you are. And I'm stuck right where I am. And I think the key is because of that very thing, because we lack repetition in the things that will bring us real mastery. And as you study the masters, you guys have talked about this before and I want to, I'm just, I'm repeating it. So I have no problem repeating this. I have no problem repeating principles.

Because when we hear it again, it'll sink it into our neural connections, our subconscious again and again and again. So I'm gonna, sorry, not sorry, I'm gonna keep repeating things. But we've talked about these principles before when I talked about that wonderful book, Talent is Overrated, or the excellent book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. It literally studies the lives of true, true world -class people and top performers.

They repeat.

Rachel Denning (04:15.79)
again and again and again, whether it's shooting, making shots in basketball, Michael Jordan would shoot 1000 shots, right daily training, whether it's Andre Rieu practicing his violin, performing with his orchestra every single day for hours and hours and hours.

or doing your routines and rituals daily again and again and again. It's, you know, so it's interesting. Well, I'm going to, I guess we'll just dive into it, right? We'll start like, what are the examples? Cause you might, you might be wondering like, well, what am I going to repeat? What do I need to repeat? And that's the key. Like you got to find out and revisit what, what do you need to repeat? What is it? Let me ask that. What would, what would make the biggest difference for you? And we'll revisit this. We'll come back to it.

What thing, what two or three things if repeated vigorously and consistently would change your life? Let me think through that. I'll share some of mine. Years ago, so I started reading, right? You know my story, I started reading and books made the difference. And there was a few books that I just thought, man, that is so good. And what I would say to myself is, oh, that's so good, I wanna remember it. Here's what's fascinating about,

the brain, the human brain, if we hear something, so like what you're hearing right now, right? We hear something, 80 % of it will be lost within three days to ourselves, right? To our minds. 80 % gone within three days. And so we hear something, we're like, oh, that's good, I want to remember it. We watch something and say, oh, that's fantastic, I want to remember that, I want to live by it. But within three days, 80 % of it's gone.

Well, how do we increase our odds? Well, number one, writing it down, like physically writing it down there, that tactile movement helps. Number two, trying to recall it. You know, in fact, like you just purposely, you listen to something, you're okay, what did I just learn? So after this podcast, I want you to do this at the end of those things episode, then just pause and do it with yourself and your own brain and say, what did I just learn? And just try to recall it and try to repeat it to yourself. That, that recollection, right? That recalling of information.

Rachel Denning (06:39.886)
you've just consumed or heard or been exposed to actually increases retention. And if you recall it and then write it down, it can increase increase retention up to 60, 70%. Right. And so we have to keep doing that because it won't stick. And so with some of those books, I would say, man, that is so good. I want to do that. I'm going to do that. But then within a few days or a few weeks, I.

I would catch myself and I'm not, I'm not doing that. And so without knowing it, without understanding any of what I'm teaching you right now, man, I wish I would have had a more mentors back then and more coaches, but without knowing it, I just, I would get so frustrated in myself and say, no, I want to think because I wanted this mindset, right? I wanted mental strength and fortitude. I wanted to just have my mind.

be utilize it as the, the powerful tool and weapon that it actually is. Most of us are not utilizing it even near its capacity. And I know I'm not either, but that's, that's the wonderful power of this, my friends. And so exciting is we can, through repetition, we can optimize.

Everything we can optimize our minds. We can optimize our bodies. We know optimize our spirits our lives our emotion everything and so one of those was as a man thinketh and I would read that and think this is so powerful. Oh, man I want this in my life and I would try but it just wouldn't stick and so fortunately I had the Insight like I'm just gonna reread it so I'd reread it and

Oh, this is so good. Oh, yes. Okay, I'm gonna live by this and then I would of course fail to live by it and I'm like, okay, I need to reread it and Finally, right finally I was like, you know what forget this I need to read a little bit from this every single morning Like I'm so I'm so I'm so set on this. I'm if I'm gonna make it a part of my life I have to repeat it

Rachel Denning (08:58.605)
And so I literally would read a page or two every single day from that extraordinary book because I wanted his thinking to be my thinking. I wanted to take the principles ideas in the practices he teaches and I wanted to make them mine. I wanted to internalize them. And guess what? It finally started to click. It finally started to stay. I finally gained.

retention through repetition. Ooh, write that down. If you're taking notes, write that down and recall it, say it to yourself, repeat it. Retention comes through repetition. And this is where we get the skill. This is where we get mastery. And my friends, like anything and everything we want to succeed in, we have to study. You've heard me say that before, and I'm saying it again because we are not afraid of repetition here in this podcast, are we?

We have to study what we want to succeed in and not just study it once, not just read the book once, not just do the thing once, not just write down the goal once, not say the affirmation once, but we have to drill it into our lives through repetition. And again, you can find this everywhere. This isn't, this isn't my opinion. This isn't just my experience. Like this is key across the board study mastery at any level from

martial arts to music, from business to fitness, from art to whatever it is you want to do and achieve, it's repetition. So retention comes through repetition and so does mastery. So I was reading this day in and day out and it stuck. I was like, oh yeah. Right? And then we don't get there and let up, right? The greats, they don't like

get to mastery, they don't win the competition and be like, boom, I have arrived. I don't have to practice anymore. It was the great, I can't remember which one, the great violinist. Oh man. I can't think of his name right now. Like literally world renowned, one of the best in the world. And he said, he said, I will notice.

Rachel Denning (11:21.997)
when I notice if I miss a little bit of practice. And I think he even mentioned like an hour, I can tell. And he says, my coach can tell, you know, my coach can tell if I miss an hour, I can tell if I miss two. And then he said something like, even my audience can tell if I have missed a day of practice.

And we're talking like the masters on average in any field, they're practicing their craft from six to eight hours a day. They train, they repeat those moves. Like they, they do the golf swing again and again and again. They practice their sales pitch again and again and again.

But this is again, the greatest irony and I'm repeating this on purpose. I'm going to drill it into our heads. The greatest irony is that the vast majority of us, we balk at repetition. We don't want it. We have this almost default setting in our heads of like, Oh, I did that before. I've done that. Why would I do that again? I practiced that shot. I, I did it 10 times, right? And we want to congratulate ourselves for doing it a few times. But when we look at the masters,

They do it thousands of times. If anyone, you know, so to speak, and this is where our thinking is flawed. If anyone could have missed some days of taking shots, it was Michael Jordan, right? The man could nail the shots. And yet of all people who were not taking a, who were in the gym practicing the same shot again and again and again, a thousand times, it was him.

What do you need to practice more? What do you need to repeat? Repetition is the unattractive key to success. It is not sexy, my friends. It's just not. But it has to be done and it has to be done well. So let me make a distinction here. Just doing it again and again and again and again doesn't necessarily make you great at it. How many people have we met?

Rachel Denning (13:30.605)
How many people do you know or even yourself? You've done things many, many times, but you still suck at them. With me? And this is just honest, blunt truth. I remember meeting...

I remember meeting this, well, I've met lots of people and they'd done it for so many years, whatever their thing was. From parenting, you can raise your kids from the first to the last and if you don't do it well, then even after all those years, you can still just stink at it. I meet people in their jobs, right? Whether it's at the grocery store or at the bank.

or in anything from architecture to engineering to anything and just doing it, just going through the motions of it won't actually give you mastery, skill or competence. We all know people who've been doing their job for a very long time and they still stink at it. We know teachers, right? And this just breaks my heart. I've met teachers, I've been teaching for 25 years. I'm like, and you still suck at it.

You can't teach because you're not repeating the things that actually work that matter. And I'm not trying to be rude. So please receive this in the way it's trying to be shared. Repeat it well. Do it really well. Otherwise you're just repeating incompetence. Does that make sense? And so we have to repeat it and we have to do it well and it's not attractive.

It's not sexy. It just has to be done. It just has to be done. So I read a page or two from As a Man Thinketh Every Day for over two years. And then I still regularly reread it and revisit it. And then I thought, man, this is working. What else do I need to work on? And I really, really wanted to work on my social skills because I was so timid and insecure. And then I remember catching myself often being a f***er.

Rachel Denning (15:44.941)
afraid to talk to people because I didn't know what to talk about.

I didn't know what to ask. I didn't know what to say. I did not know how to have a good conversation.

And so I'm like, man, how can I fix that one? And so I would read, how to win friends and influence people, right? And I'd read that and be like, yes, I wanna do this. Oh, I wanna be able to do this. I wanna be able to have meaningful conversations with people. I wanna be able to connect. And then it grew to, I wanna be influential. Not only do I wanna connect with people, I wanna be able to influence people. How do I do that? And again, I went through that kind of same scenario, right? Maybe I'm a slow learner.

I went through the same scenario. I'd read the book and be like, Ooh, I want to do that. And then I'm like, I'm going to do that. But then after a few days or a few weeks, it would wear off. And then later on I catch myself. Ah, I'm still afraid of having conversations. I'm still afraid of like having a 30 minute drive with people because I would be terrified. What am I going to say? Or I'd meet someone and it would be awkward or weird. Or, you know, I want to have a conversation. Well, I want to talk to them. I want to connect with them, but I...

wouldn't know how. So I'm gonna reread the book. And eventually I came to the conclusion, Oh, I need to read a few pages from that book every single morning, and just drill it into my conscious and subconscious mind, make it a part of who I am. And so I did that for over a couple years. And I and I repeated those things until they became a part of me.

Rachel Denning (17:29.549)
And I think that's probably the main message I want to share with you right now. Identify the things that will make the biggest positive difference for you in each important aspect or bucket of your life.

What, what are the things that if you repeated vigorously and consistently, you guys remember my acronym, coffee, C A V I, I came up with that years and years ago. Part of this process, right? People get up and have their morning coffee. And I was like, no, we all need to get up and have our morning coffee. When you start every single day with coffee and it stands for consistent and vigorous improvement, CAVI, consistent vigorous improvement.

what things in each bucket of your life, if repeated consistently and vigorously, would make the biggest difference in your world. So identify those right now and write them down. In fact, I would love for you to share them with me. Shoot me a message on Instagram or on Facebook or send me an email. I would love to hear what you identify. What...

are the things that would make the absolute biggest difference in your life if you repeated them incessantly. Just like a professional athlete should make those moves practice those drills. Isn't that fascinating that the best of the best still do the drills and they start their training and they end their training and they do their practices by doing drills that they've done tens of thousands of times.

In jiu -jitsu, you still practice making that same move. Make that same move, make that same move. In music, you still practice those chords. You try to get them just, you know, your chord transitions. And in art, you're making those same strokes again and again and again and again. You're driving it into the muscle memory, right? And you're solidifying those neuro -connections and those movements and those transitions.

Rachel Denning (19:46.349)
It's so key, it's so important. And again, I'm repeating on purpose. It's not attractive, it's not sexy. It seems so mundane, it gets boring, it gets repetitive. And you find yourself like, ugh, this is so boring, I've done this before. And we tell ourselves the story of like, I don't need to do this again, I've done it before. And that's where we fall short of our potential.

And let me reiterate again, like it's not just repeating things that don't really make a difference. It's identifying, you know, the 80 -20 rule, right? What are the 20 % of things that if you repeat them and just nail them would give you 80 % of your success? What are the keys? What are the essentials to your mastery? So think about, I would say, think about your family, like your marriage, your health.

your relationship with your kids, your own knowledge, your own skills, and then particularly like you can carry this over of course to business or whatever success you want to have there in the marketplace. What do you need to repeat there? So both personal and professional. If you want to become an absolute master, if you want to become one of the best in the world, and I hope you do, I hope you long for that.

that whatever you do that's important to you, that's meaningful to you, that it just excites you, lights you up, like you want that to be a part of your life. It either is, or you want it to be. What do you need to repeat? And then repeat it again and again and again. I've done my morning routine consistently and vigorously. I did it again this morning. And I've done that for over two decades. And

It's never this like, well, I don't have to do my morning routine because I did it. You know, I did it yesterday or I did it last week or I've done it for two decades. I can not do it now. It's just, it's never the case. Books, the best books need to be read and reread and reread and reread. Parts of them need to be memorized. I hope you'll take out some flashcards or, you know, get three by five cards and write down the most important ideas, carry them with you, memorize them.

Rachel Denning (22:12.813)
I, your affirmations or declarations or incantations, the things you want to say to yourself again and again, say them thousands and then tens of thousands of times. See, we, we, we, again, here's that greatest irony. We'll say, we'll say our affirmations, you know, once in the morning, once in the evening. And we think, we think it'll stick. We think that's enough where we've been repeating to ourselves.

You know, our own insecurities, our fears, our doubts. We play those things 10 ,000 times a day.

Right? Again and again and again and we have for years and then we're thinking, well, if I just say this to myself a couple of times, once in the morning, once in the evening, I'll replace those old thinking patterns. But it just doesn't work like that. So it's thousands, tens of thousands of times. And again, you know, you and I were like, well, gosh, I've done that hundreds of times already. When do I get to stop?

I've done that hundreds of times. When will it actually change? And we just keep going. And most often when it's not working, when we're doing the right thing, but it's not working, we just haven't done it enough.

Rachel Denning (23:32.045)
have to keep repeating. What about your goals? Well, I set this goal and I just, I just keep losing focus. I just keep getting distracted. I just, I can't seem to hit the goal. I can't seem to make the change or the improvement. I want you to rewrite your goal every single morning. You're like, I did, I did it for weeks already. Jeez. Right. That's like the Napoleon dynamite voice there.

I wrote down my goal every day last week and it didn't happen. Gosh. Right? Like no! You have to keep repeating. Drive this into your soul.

Rachel Denning (24:19.597)
In the book, Pounding the Stone, he talks about how you just hit it hundreds of times and you just take your little chisel and hammer and you just hit, hit, hit, hit, hit, and you literally hit it hundreds of times and it doesn't appear as though anything's happening. And then finally on that one last hit, however many that is, however many thousands of times, finally it goes clink and it breaks, right? And splits it right where you want it to split.

but you have to just keep pounding it. You have to keep going. And what's that number? I don't know, but it's big. And then after you get it and achieve it, even the masters, they keep going. They don't let up. They don't stop. They keep repeating. Repetition is the unattractive key to success. It is the unsexy,

secret to success. But it has to happen. So what are you going to repeat? Get clear right now. What are you going to repeat? I am thinking of a couple of books that I'm going to reread again. I have set up specific strategies throughout my life. I've done this now for years because

once I had that ah -ha of like, oh man, those things that I really want, I have to take full ownership of them. I have to master them. And of course, repetition is the mother of mastery. So even recently, I'll tell you guys this, I purchased a new gorgeous leather journal. I'm so stoked about them. I literally just got them in the mail yesterday. So crazy stoked. I got two of them.

And I'm going to handwrite the most important philosophies and strategies, right? Because everything in life is built on philosophy and strategy. It's what you think and believe about it. And then it's what you do about it. And we've talked about that before, right? You got to have both philosophy and strategy. So I'm going to handwrite the

Rachel Denning (26:42.349)
absolute most important philosophies and strategies in my journal. And I am I am absolutely convinced that this book that I just got that's empty is the most important book in my life and will be the most important book in my life. And it'll be I'm hopeful that it'll be the most important book for my children and grandchildren to.

And it's the one I'm going to handwrite. Yes, handwrite. Talk about inconvenient, right? And uncomfortable. I'm going to handwrite all of the most important things in there. And then I'm going to read them and reread them all the time. Repetition thousands and thousands of time until they are so deeply ingrained in me.

Many of them already are, and it's what I realized when you look back over your life and what are the things you do really well, what are the things you've mastered, it's the things you've repeated so much.

and you've done it so often and so well that it just becomes automated. And you just do it. And people are like, how do you do that? You make it look so easy. You do it so effortlessly. How do you do that? And you're kind of like, well, I don't know. You just, you just do it. Right. And I've done that with lots of things. I'm like, I don't know. I just do it. Like how, how do you do that? I'm like, I don't know. And I literally have to go back in my mind.

and remember the process I went through the transformation I went through, which include insane amounts of repetition until it became so automated and, and almost effortless. Do those things. And I'm going to put that in my book and I'm going to, I'm going to write it all in there. It's going to take me a while to write it all in there. And I'm going to keep adding to it. I'll leave, leave spaces. And then I'm going to repeat it just like I do with my philosophy journal.

Rachel Denning (28:47.277)
just like I do at the vision board, just like I do with rewriting my goals, you just keep going. And remember what I told you about rewriting your goals, only one of two things will happen if you rewrite your goal every single morning. Either you'll stop writing down your goal or you'll achieve it.

That's it. And when we repeat well, we do it consistently and vigorously, whatever's in the way yields to the force of repetition. Ooh, I like that. Write that down. Whatever we persist in doing yields to the force of repetition.

Emerson said that and I've shared that before with you. I'm going to repeat it. That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do. Not that the nature of the thing has changed, but that our ability to do has increased.

Some things will only yield to persistence.

Ooh, that's good. Some things will only yield to persistence and the force of repetition will break through the obstacles and the barriers that stand in our way. My friends, we are training for greatness. And excellence is an art won by training and habituation. Repetition, right? That's from Will Durant. And then of course, Archaeologist said,

Rachel Denning (30:29.261)
We do not rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training and that training is repetition, repetition, repetition, doing it well, doing it right, doing it often, doing it consistently, doing it vigorously. So identify just a few things, two or three things that you're going to start repeating now. And it's both personally and professionally identify those things, make commitments, set calendar, set schedules, set alerts.

Get accountability partners, make it a part of who you are and how you do life. Repeat the things that matter.

and it will eventually yield. Whatever's in the way will have to yield to the force and persistence of repetition. Reach upward.