How to Forge Success From Nowhere

In this article, I want to explain how to forge success from nowhere. I’ll share a method I’ve used many times, sometimes knowingly, sometimes unknowingly, to achieve great things in several areas.

The remarkable thing is that this method is fundamentally psychological. Consider it the key mental strategy that you require to forge success in any pursuit, whether you’re just starting out, or are already successful and want to continue your growth trajectory.

Let’s not waste any time: I want to get straight to this method.

Forge Success: The Method

The method is very simple: so simple, in fact, that we tend to overlook it. All our lives, it’s right under our nose. Here it is:

1. Choose one pursuit you’re currently undertaking or wish to undertake;
2. Imagine the ultimate fruition of this pursuit, the highest possible achievement you could attain. It is essential that this should seem far beyond your current capabilities and require several years (even decades) for its completion;
3. Plan out your path. Make a clear strategy for its achievement and take steady, measured action;
4. Refine your strategy over time, adding in effective techniques and chopping out ineffective ones;
5. Persevere until you eventually achieve your goal.

Yes, it is that simple. Choose, Imagine, Plan, Refine, Persevere.

You might think I’m writing this to gain publicity or sell you on the idea of easy success, but don’t be fooled. You’ve already gone through this process to reach your past achievements. Perhaps you simply haven’t realised that this is a foolproof strategy to forge success from nowhere.

And before we look at some examples of this in action, do you want to know what the most important step is? Any guesses?

The most important step is number 2. Yes, your imagination is key, critical, indispensable. I’ll explain why this is the case further down, but for now, just know that:

• to achieve something in the future, you must be able to visualise it now;
• our present visions usually seem impossible to reach, but with enough diligent effort, we eventually far surpass them.

Let’s explain the role ambition plays.

Be Ambitious to Forge Success

An indispensable part of this method is your imagination and your ambition. You must imagine ambitious goals and eventualities for yourself. You must entertain them (as best you can) as a real possibility, regardless of whether they seem impossible right now, scare you, or make you feel incapable.

As I explain in my article The Psychology of Ambitious Goals, we must do this because:

• we overestimate what we can achieve in the next year, but dramatically underestimate what we can achieve in the next five years;
• we wildly underestimate our capabilities in general;
• we struggle to project into the future with any accuracy: our “realistic” ideas aren’t realistic at all;
• skills and success build not linearly but exponentially;
• what seems ambitious now eventually seems natural and inevitable;
• high expectations lead to relentless action.

If you don’t understand this, I hope you’ll remember that you must be ambitious, so ambitious that your goals are scary and intimidating. You must do this. It’s the most critical step in the method.

If you don’t, you’re crippling this entire process and settling for much less than what’s possible. If you do, you’re setting in motion a process that will lead you far beyond even those scary goals.

5x Your Current Pursuit

Here’s another great thing about this method: it helps us forge success in pursuits where we’ve already had success.

What I’ve noticed is that we’re much better at being ambitious at the outset of projects. Once we achieve our initial goals, we start to settle. We no longer set ambitious goals because we feel comfortable and don’t want to rock our steady little boat.

But we must realise that we’re missing out on a fabulous opportunity. We’re missing out on becoming world-class, of achieving truly extraordinary things.

If this method helps us go from nowhere to competency and success, imagine where it can get us when we begin from competency and success.

For example, if you’re a professional, I imagine you went through this process to reach your current position. Now, consider what would happen if you repeated this, letting your imagination run wild and dreaming up a fabulous new career possibility for yourself. You could end up in a remarkable position.

And crucially, notice that if you don’t allow yourself to do this, you’ll never advance. Everything begins in your mind, in your imagination. So if you don’t complete this step, you’re screwed. You simply cannot advance if you have no destination to reach.

Further down, we discuss why this method works. For now, I’d like to share some examples of this method at work in my life.

Examples

To help illustrate this, I want to use some recent examples from my own life. I’ve been successful in many pursuits in life, but I’d like to focus on my journeys with guitar, Spanish, and this website. Looking back, these areas are great examples of how to forge success from nowhere.

In each case, I began with making a clear choice about where I wanted to invest my time to get good. Then I allowed myself to imagine some distant possibility that seemed like a pipe dream. In each case, it definitely felt like the goal was beyond me. But after persisting enough, I’ve conquered these goals, and then some.

My Guitar Journey

When I began playing the guitar in 2016, I had a vague vision of playing my favourite songs from the time, many of which were by The Beatles.

But I had never played before, and when I first started, everything felt extremely awkward. Forget playing Hey Jude or Penny Lane: it took me 30+ attempts to play a clean D chord, and two months to fumble my way through a three-chord song.

Besides, music is an area in which people tend to believe they’re inherently good or bad, and I was the same. For months, I thought I wasn’t good enough, even though I’d already bought my guitar and started practicing.

The first couple of years were pretty painful, but deep down I knew that by persevering, I’d eventually reach levels I couldn’t foresee.

Not long into my journey, I realised that the song I really wanted to play was Here Comes the Sun. In recent years, it had become one of my favourites. But listening to the precise strumming and melodic lines, I knew I was a long way from that.

Over the following months and years, I held this goal in my heart as I diligently practiced, learned theory, practiced learning songs by ear.

One day, it all came together, like when flour, eggs and milk suddenly combine to make a cake mixture. I saw a live version of Here Comes the Sun, and glimpsing at the guitarist, I saw they had a capo on the seventh fret and kept returning to an open D chord.

From that clue, I figured out the melody and the chords. Before I knew it, I was able to play the main part to Here Comes the Sun. It took three to four years, but it all came together in one day.

Now, after nearly a decade of guitar playing, Here Comes the Sun seems very simple to me. I can learn and often do learn several songs of this level every week when I’m in the mood, and all by ear. I went beyond my goal, and then some.

You see the pattern? I choose my pursuit: guitar. I allowed myself to dream some idealistic future possibility: play Here Comes the Sun. I made a plan to put that into action: take several guitar courses, study theory, and practice transcribing. I corrected course along the way, and I persevered through all the obstacles.

In this episode of the Deep Psychology podcast, we discuss why nothing is inherently difficult to learn.

Spanish

When I started learning Spanish in 2018, I knew almost nothing. Yet, since Spanish is the native language of my girlfriend and her family, I always knew I wanted to reach a high level.

During one of my first formal language classes, back when I was a beginner, we happened to touch on the subject of goals. Out of nowhere, the words “I want to reach C2 level eventually” slipped out of my mouth, in front of the whole class. If you don’t know what this means, at C2 your level is comparable to that of an educated native speaker.

As soon as I said that, I regretted it. Talk about setting yourself up for a fall. How would I, a person who has never reached any significant level in a foreign language, ever reach C2 level in Spanish? I really wanted to reach it, but it seemed impossible to me.

Roll on to May 2023, five years and thousands of hours of practice later. I sat the official Spanish C2 exam and passed with flying colours.

Again, the pattern repeats: Choose, Imagine, Plan, Refine, Persevere. I made a firm choice that I wanted to learn Spanish. I imagined reaching a level that seemed far beyond my capabilities. I made a rough plan to read lots, listen lots, and practice a tonne with my girlfriend. I refined, chopping and changing my strategies and methods as I went. And I persevered through all the Threshold Guardians that attempted to thwart me.

Now, getting the C2 certificate seems like a formality, an inevitability. I was always bound to get it, not because of talent (talent doesn’t exist), but because that’s what I set my heart on and worked very hard to achieve for over four years. I couldn’t go wrong.

This Website

Finally, this website itself also proves it’s possible to forge success from nowhere. Let me share a potted summary of my journey so far.

I began this project during Covid. I knew that I wanted to work in the field of psychology at some point, but I was procrastinating it, doing everything but developing solid professional expertise in the field.

That said, I was reading books about all kinds of psychology topics, and I even had a study schedule. I didn’t know exactly where it was taking me, and I barely imagined it would take me to where I am now.

Then, one day, I had the idea of starting a blog to document and share all my learnings. I was already taking extensive notes, so why not turn them into blog posts? I also liked the idea of having a creative outlet after months of pandemic-induced stagnation.

I had already had a similar website back in 2018, but at that time I lacked clarity about what I wanted to do, I was stuck in a life crisis, and eventually the project fizzled out. But through that project, I discovered that websites are pretty easy to create, and I had an inkling that it’s possible to build an audience with enough perseverance.

Deep Psychology (or The Great Updraft, as it was called) started out as a Tumblr blog. I soon realised that I should get a proper website, so I paid for hosting, got a brand-new custom domain, and started posting two to three times per week.

I realised I really loved sharing what I was learning, so I started reading about blogging. Could I turn this into a business? How do you build traffic? How much can you really earn?

Around that time, I started appearing on the search engines, and started modestly. In fact, I still have my first week of Google traffic written down: during the week beginning the 9th of June 2021, the site appeared in the results four times and got zero clicks.

In the first 30 days, it appeared eleven times and got one click. In fact, during the first calendar year, only around 1250 people visited my site.

Besides the modest start, my mindset was pretty negative back then. Sure, I had chosen to build this website. I had imagined making a good living from it someday, and I’d even made a rough plan and began to crawl my way towards my goal. Part of me believed it was possible.

But most of me thought I was foolish, and for months and months I was overcome with the feeling that I’d never get here, just like when I started learning guitar and when I hastily blurted out my language-learning ambitions in front of my Spanish class. I felt very inferior and uncertain.

Somehow, I kept at it. I’ve since invested thousands of hours (and pounds) in this project. And it’s paid off.

In January 2025, I had 22,000 visitors, 34,000 views, and 20,000 clicks on the search engines, and the numbers continue to grow. This week, I reached the milestone of 1,000 visitors in a single day.

I’m also mentioned on some amazingly prestigious sites, like Oxford University Press. It’s now my main source of income and where I dedicate most of my time.

Anyways, I’ll stop boring you with the details. The lesson here is that I chose, I imagined, I planned, I refined over and over again, and I persevered over and over again.

Since I’ve already gained some competence, I recently decided to apply my own method to dream up some new amazing possibilities for the site.

Let me say: they’re orders of magnitude beyond what feels realistic right now, and they’re unimaginably more ambitious than the goals I had when I started. Honestly, they feel impossible to me. However, I trust in this process, and I’m willing to go through it all over again to achieve them.

Why We Can Forge Success

Let me now philosophise about why this method works. The reason is mysterious, but simple: it’s because imagination is the main ingredient when you want to forge success.

On one hand, how can you ever achieve something if you don’t even imagine it as a possibility? Everything you’ve ever achieved (or done) only existed as a vision at some point.

Conversely, if we imagine a possibility, however grand or intimidating, it then becomes possible, because part of us believes it is possible, and subconsciously we already starts forging plans for making it real.

Think of imagination like the first domino in a giant chain that spreads across an entire room. All those dominos are waiting to be knocked over, but if you don’t tumble the first one, you can’t tumble any of them.

And as we’ve discussed, we always achieve far more than what we originally believe we will. So we must imagine, and do so boldly.

Without imagination, I’d have never mastered Spanish, learned guitar, or grown this website. Sure, imagination wasn’t the only ingredient, but I had to knock over that first domino to get the chain started.

It’s not only that imagination is merely the first domino in the chain. It’s that it defines what we want and what’s possible for us. Whatever we allow ourselves to imagine eventually becomes reality through perseverance, whether we dream big or small.

I also want you to realise that all success, all skills, all careers and all hobbies begin from nowhere. Our competence in all these areas is, at one point, a figment of our imagination. We’ve all gone through this process many times.

It’s the supreme strategy. Once you set in motion this process, you start tapping into the power of persistence, of exponential results, of high expectations leading to relentless action, of our skills and capabilities multiplying far beyond what we believed possible. Eventually, you become irresistible.