Having a shortcut mindset means that you prefer to skip gaining experience for the sake of getting to outcomes faster. This manifest commonly in those who play the lottery, gamble without calculating the risks, and try get rich quick schemes. In sports, you will find this mindset in those who take illegal performance enhancing drugs as well as those who cheat the game in other ways.

The effect of this mindset is that it breeds impatience. Impatience is a character trait that has significant consequences for those pursuing difficult goals. Impatience causes people to quit too soon in the face of adversity, which ultimately leads to missed opportunities.

Similarly, when one compromises their ability to learn from experience because they are impatiently looking for a shortcut, they miss out on picking up critical life skills. Skills such as assessing and using feedback, self-efficacy, and the fundamentals of planning and executing a process.

Simply stated, the shortcut mindset is detrimental. Temporarily getting ahead with shortcuts rarely if ever turns out to be worth missing out on long term opportunities and the skills you learn through taking your time.

Preventing a Shortcut Mindset

When someone starts on the journey to pursue a difficult goal, there is normally an understanding that the journey is hard, and that success won’t happen overnight. However, even in knowing this, it’s human nature to lack the patience you need for success.

To prevent this, you must pursue your goals with these 4 steps in mind:

1) Make the process the goal, and the goal your compass

When the process is the goal, achieving your goal is 100% within your control.  By having complete control of your success or failure, you eliminate all external excuses. What’s more, when the process is the goal, you can regularly measure progress, success, and failure by your ability to stay on track following the process.

The biggest mistake you can make when pursuing long term goals is focusing too much on the goal and not enough on the process. Eliminate this mistake by making the process the goal, and your chance of achieving the outcome you want will increase tenfold.

2) Make time for your goals every single day

Your success or failure in pursuit of a goal has nothing to do with the goal itself.  Instead, it has everything to do with how you prioritize your time.

A goal is about your future, a priority is about your present.  If these two are not linked, then you won’t reach your goal. Simply stated, your daily priorities must include working on your goals.

A goal that is important to you is not something you work on once a week, or once a month, or whenever you feel like it.  Indeed, a goal that is important to you is something you make time for every single day.

3) Adopt the idea of a goal progression

A progression is the process of moving gradually towards a more advanced state. You don’t just go from the couch to running a marathon. You must learn to walk before you run, then you must run a mile before you run 5 miles, etc.

To break a goal down into a progression, focus on the processes of making progress. This thought pattern should break down the anatomy of the progression into three characteristics:

1. Repeatable: The goal progression must center around a routine you can either do daily, weekly, or something in between.
2. Measurable: The goal progression must be one that you can measure and track the performance of a skill with precise numbers that lead to a visual representation of progress over time.
3. Systematic: The goal progression must intertwine with an overall system of proven processes that create synergy (running three days a week + doing squats and lunges twice a week + 2 days of rest = process synergy).

4) Celebrate the small wins

Imagine a steep stairway traversing up a skyscraper. At the summit of each level is a doorway into the building. Breaking down a goal into small wins is a lot like climbing a stairway like this.  On each level the door represents an entryway to your small win. In addition, inside each door is a party waiting for you to arrive to celebrate your win and to recover your stamina.

Surely, climbing a stairway is easy as long as you have the stamina. However, the difficulty with executing this simple method is both in building the stairway (defining the small wins) and in maintaining stamina (taking a moment to celebrate the small win).

If you are in a rush to achieve your goals, it’s convenient to skip these steps.  When you are in a rush, you just want to execute and achieve your goal as fast as possible.  This is the shortcut mindset, and a shortcut mindset is the fatal error you must prevent.  In the famous words of Coach John Wooden:

Be quick, but don’t hurry