You want to be successful, right? And in theory, you can be.
Success is an individual state for each person. For some, it could mean winning a gold medal or getting a promotion while, for others, it could mean getting out of bed.
But if you’re struggling, you have to ask yourself if you’ve given up way before you achieve your desired goal. Or if you’re happy with some short-term success, early on in your career.
Have you chosen to stay in comfortable stagnation and think that success is only for others, thinking your desires won’t happen for you.
If you want to be successful at anything, you need to accept and run with some basic principles, i.e some cold-hard truths you be avoiding.
Whether you are in a corporate job or leading your own business, there are nine hard truths you must embrace in order to succeed; 5 will be covered in this article:
- Success is different for everyone
As mentioned earlier, not everyone perceives success in the same way. For many, and the way society paints it, success is about making money, having power and influence. It’s about being asset-rich with a big house, a big car, and expensive possessions.
To become truly successful, you have to work out what success means to you, not to your parents or your friends or colleagues, but you. What sort of life do you want: Lots of travel, or the big house ideal? Or do you want to alleviate poverty or discover new health treatments? Are study and research your passion?
Or do you want to balance your life and family commitments? Maybe being home in time for family dinners and keeping your weekends free is your priority. What will your life look like once you’ve reached your desire – are you happy and fulfilled or struggling and burned out?
Take time to work out what success means for you and what benefits you will get from having it. You will be much more motivated to achieve your desires and much happier when you get there! Whatever success means for you, focus on that (visioning is great for this!).
- Be prepared for the cost
Whatever your success goal is, you must be prepared to give up some comfort to get there. Because whenever you make a choice, you are also choosing to give something up or to miss out on.
If you want to focus one hundred percent on being a CEO in five years times, you are choosing to spend all your energy and time on achieving that goal. There won’t be much time left over for friends or family. There won’t be time for a lazy weekend or vacations. That’s the cost.
If you choose to prioritize family time, you are giving up the opportunity for fast-tracking your career so you need to figure out how to make money while taking care of yourself and your family. You need to answer the question of is the sacrifice worth it for all involved (and communicate this to them).
None of these are bad choices, but you need to make them with your eyes open. You must understand what you’re giving up to succeed at what you want. Whatever your decision you must be prepared to be flexible, to learn and adapt to changing circumstances. You must be ready to grow and to sit with discomfort.
- Prepare for some pain
Being successful may not be a comfortable road. In fact, comfort is the enemy of success. If you’re comfortable, your energy goes down. You’re not going to take chances, and you’re not going to explore.
If you want to stay in the same position, if you choose safety, then that’s your choice – but accept that this will not lead to a successful life.
To be successful, you have to choose to learn and evolve and grow. You’ll need to engage with the world and be open to possibilities. It’s not a hard-nosed race to the top but a journey to becoming your best you.
Growing and learning and being prepared to start again, acknowledging that you don’t know everything – these can be painful concepts to accept. And that is why most people choose not to learn and grow. But the road to success requires you to be humble. It requires you to accept that you still have so much to learn. To be truly successful you need to be constantly changing, constantly becoming a better version of yourself.
- Prepare to fail
Fear of failure is what prevents many people from succeeding. They think that failure is final and conclusive and ends up defining you as a person, or that everything has to be perfect before starting.
However, the most successful people allow themselves to fail. Think of Walt Disney or The Wright Brothers, for example. Successful people pick themselves up, recover and learn from what went wrong.
You may not even be aware that failure can and does happen to everyone. Sometimes factors outside your control can scuttle your project. Sometimes you make mistakes. But regardless of how you came to fail there is only one way out that leads to success.
You assess, and you learn, and you don’t make that mistake again. You don’t beat yourself up. You see that failure as a steppingstone to your future success.
- Don’t confuse willpower with commitment
People tend to mistake willpower for commitment. Just wanting something to happen will not make it so. That’s why most New Year’s resolutions don’t work. If you rely on willpower, you will run out of energy fast. You’ll get discouraged, and you’ll give up, thinking that success is not for you.
If willpower is teeth-gritting, ‘in spite of’ negative energy, commitment is a different breed of animal. Commitment is positive. It assumes that your goal is achievable and getting there will happen. It is a considered approach to achieving goals.
Commitment focuses your energy, your mind, and your passion on achieving something that is truly important to you. If you’re committed to your goal, you will plan and work and adapt to get there.
“Success if the sum of small efforts repeated day in and day out” (Robert Collier)
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