The most important single factor for success, we are told by those who sound like they know, is grit.   Grit is the ability to keep going in the face of discouragement.  It requires a long goal, an ability to persevere and unshakable faith in the value of the goal.

Fear is what stops us from accomplishing anything difficult.  It is much easier to do the easy thing than the hard thing.   Fear is a primitive emotion, easily accessed, and it overrides every other emotion when it is activated.   It comes from our survival mode and tells us to run like hell from danger, or curl up in a ball and pretend we’re dead.

Seth Godin makes this point about the amygdala, the part of the brain where fear lives, and how we must learn to overcome the impulse to shrink from a challenge.   He also points out that grit is essential.   He also says this, which is scary as hell:

Grit and faith in an idea is not enough.   The idea itself must be great.   A friend of his parents lived his life the slave of a single idea that he pursued with grit.  The trouble was, the idea itself wasn’t so great and it did not merit the grit and singleminded devotion this failed man gave it.

Picture Woody Allen’s father from Love and Death.  “My father was very attached to his small piece of land,” Allen’s character narrates and we see a crazed man in a cell, hugging a small square of sod.  “My father was an Idiot.”  Mmmm.