If you’re serious about any goal, you can pave the road to success by making it automatic. Ronco said it in their mantra, “Just set it and forget it.”

Books on the habits and the routines of the most successful people show that their success didn’t happen quickly; they were successful because of a lifetime of deliberate habits (decisions they made once that were then automatic).

Financial advisor David Bach, author of The Automatic Millionaire (my inspiration for this post), recommends a fantastic approach for financial success that can be used to achieve any goal, including climbing. It’s not quick, but it gets you where you need to go through method and consistency. He wants you to make it automatic.

Let’s continue to look at a financial example. If you take 10% (before taxes) off the top of every paycheck and put it into a retirement account, you won’t even notice. But if you get it in your check, not only does the government take their cut, but—let’s be honest here—you’d probably fritter it away on consumables. When you get to retirement, like so many people, you’d wonder, “What the hell happened to all my money? Where’d it all go?”

(If you want to know more about the science of why we don’t save for the long term and instead opt for the immediate, check out the work of behavioral economists, Dan Arielly. His books, Predictably Irrational and the Upside of Irrationality are fantastic. My post on Audiobooks has the full list of recommended readings.)

Basically, all the science, the research, and the studies point to the fact that we can’t trust ourselves to make good decisions. So we have to craft a plan, make a series of rules and procedures for ourselves to follow, and then automate it.

Now, let’s apply these principle to climbing. Let’s say you really want to climb 5.14. Well, are you paying yourself first? Have you automated your training to get you where you want to go? ‘Cause if you’re sporadic, all over the place (see Tuning out Distractions), training a little here, a little there, hoping that someday you’ll send, you won’t get where you want to go. You have to be deliberate. And the easier you make that for yourself, the greater the likelihood of success.

You have to construct time constraints for yourself as well as protect your training time from outside forces that want your attention during those vital few hours. You need to construct levees strong enough to withstand the rising demands on your time. Each year, review your (realistic) goals for the year, talk it over with your team (sweetie and climbing partners), sketch out a plan for the year, and execute the plan.

You take the guesswork out of your climbing schedule and start scheduling and structuring your life with climbing as a respected, protected part of it. You create little rules and goals for yourself (like saving 10% of your paycheck), maybe it’s training or climbing 2 days/ week, (if you have a really supportive team, maybe 3 days per week.) Whatever it is, it has to work for you and your lifestyle. In my garage I have a calendar (featuring Pope Francis) where I write down all of my training and climbing days for the upcoming training cycle, that way when the wife wants to know if I’m free, I can tell her with confidence that I am not—I’ll be hangboarding that day.

Achieving monster goals takes years of dedication. It can feel incredibly slow. But the math is on your side. Just like saving money, gains don’t need to depend on single lump-sum payouts. You don’t have to go hard all the time, you don’t have to be fast. We’re playing the long game and seeing slow, consistent growth. You want to get to your climbing goals. So set up your own training program that you can sustain for the long haul. Then you’ll be an Automatic Crusher!