Success can be defined by all sorts of things. You can define success by money, happiness, your home, your family, your vehicles, or your status in your career.
The truth is success is defined by you.
What you have to do to become successful is also up to you. Because you decide what is success to you, you have to decide when and if you will get there. To start out you want to define success.
At what point will you be successful? How much money will you make? How many children will you have? Will you even be married? How many promotions from success are you? What will you drive? You see, it is all up to you.
You should put a lot of thought into what you consider success. Our world is a very materialistic world and by being so most of us get sucked into thinking that we will only be successful when others tell us we are.
This is a very important thought you should extinguish. No one other than you should be able to tell you when you have succeeded. Only when you have taken the time to really think about what success means to you, will you be able to truly find the happiness that comes with being successful.
After you decide what success means to you, you have to decide what actions will take you there. Each little step of the way that you get to is another small success you should celebrate. No matter how far from or how close to your final goal you are, you have to celebrate each benchmark you achieve.
When you do this, your brain subconsciously connects all the work you did to the pleasure of the success. After a couple of celebrations that are only about your success you will grow to enjoy work more because in the end you know you will be successful from it.
Here are a few guidelines you might want to consider when defining your success. One could be: to be truly successful means you have to do it ethically. Ill-gotten success will only leave a part of you empty, begging for more, there is no question about it, to most this is not true success.
Another guideline you might consider: your success must not be achieved at the expense of others. People will help you along the way but success is more about reaching out than it is about moving up.
Help enough people and get the things you want, and you will make it to the top, and have a bunch of close and successful friends there with you.
Achievement that moves other people ahead is even more success for you in the end.
You also will want to make an honest assessment of where you are before you start defining success for yourself. Figure out where you want to be, then complete the steps needed to get there, this oversimplification has a lot of power. It is not a simple task when the gap between the two points is wide, you should take action toward your goal every day.
You will have what appears to be failures along the way, but keep taking action, learn from those who have done what you want to do, the old adage tells us we should learn from our mistakes, but if you want to be on the fast track to success, then learn from other people’s mistakes too. This way you learn from others and don’t make mistakes that take more time to get to your goal.
It is very important while on the road to success to have benchmarks as well.
Benchmarks are smaller goals. Let’s use an example. Say you want to make $1000 a week and you are currently at $100 a week. You should give yourself a set amount of time. Ninety days is a great time frame for goals. The reason why is it is close enough to feel like you can’t procrastinate, but far enough away to be able to achieve the goal. Anyhow this is your goal, $1,000 a week in 90 days, give or take it is about 12 weeks.
A benchmark for this would be a smaller goal that you could be happy with if you don’t meet the main goal of $1,000 a week. For this example you want to use something that is 75-80% of the main goal. This would be $750-$800 per week.
This should really help you get started on the road to success. With all of these tips and guidelines, take your time to really figure your definition and then go for it.
Achievements Don’t Happen Overnight
It is a common myth that success just happens to people. A lot of times, those who aren’t successful begrudge those who have achieved a certain level of success. To reach full achievement you’ll have to get over any feelings that success and achievement are just handed to people because of who they are or luck.
Such misconceptions about success that you may have – These ideas could be all that are holding you back – separating you from the success you want and deserve. In fact, it is probably better to use the word ‘achievement’ in place of ‘success’ because it promotes the idea of taking action and doing something. Notice the root of the word is ‘achieve’.
Now, success doesn’t really ever happen by accident to people, even though it can appear so. The idea of the overnight success, or even the person who just so happened to pick an amazing stock in the stock market are really nothing more than myths.
Usually it is the seasoned investor who has learned a lot and understands (even at a subconscious level) how to choose a winning stock that gets wealthy with stocks – not the guy who picks one at random.
On the other hand, you do occasionally hear of people picking that one right stock before it increases in value, but it is so rare that when it does happen it is newsworthy. Still, any such immediate success rarely lasts. True and lasting success has to be earned; it must be achieved for it to last and have all of the positive benefits it brings.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, overnight success in the entertainment industry and politics are almost non-existent. We often hear rags-to-riches stories and accept them as truth without digging into the facts. These make for nice stories, as they show anyone can catch a lucky break.
While these stories are often not true, when they are they are always the result of hard work, risk, and/or persistence. Not doing the hard work but reaping the rewards is a sure ticket to eventual failure. Any such success is short-lived and empty.
Now for those who somehow beat the odds and become an overnight success, it is possible to maintain that success, but only if they’re willing to do the work needed to maintain it.
Any worthwhile achievement will take a lot of hard work, but if you have the right goal, motivation and reason, success will surely be found by sheer persistence. Yet it may not seem like work at all. You need to be able to look at things with the right perspective.
You’re no longer doing work for the sake of work, you’re doing it to achieve something – something good that you desire, and in doing so you will be exposing yourself to opportunities when the arise.
It is often said that opportunity knocks only once, but the successful achievers believe it may knock twice but they never know if they missed that first knock.
Those who are massive achievers, the ones that have reached the pinnacle of whatever field they are in, are those who are not just doing it for the right reasons, but those who are able to recognize and seize opportunities whenever they present themselves.
For sure, sometimes those opportunities may not pan out, and they may even appear to be failures. But what does the successful achiever do? They take whatever they can get from these apparent failures and move on – stronger and better equipped for success than they were before. They then start looking for the next opportunity and seize it as well. Oftentimes they will seem to fail to the casual observer.
What they are really doing is failing forward. Whereas the average person may see failure as something holding them back, top achievers find value in them – they keep trying, they don’t give up. After all, they know what they want and they’ll get it, and something as common as a “failure” isn’t going to hold them back.
It is these things that make people appear to be overnight successes, but those who are quick to label people as such are the same ones who don’t want to do the hard, but rewarding, work it takes to achieve true success.
Other Key Factors for Achievement
Achievement is not just getting what we want, but also getting ahead. It’s difficult to advance our lot in life if we lack character. Character is the result of habits, but those with poor self-esteem may believe habits are the result of character. To the outside observer this also seems true, and to some degree it is. After all, who would think a person that succumbs to destructive or poor habits could also have a strong character?
To be clear, our habits do not always reflect our character and here’s why. The difference is in our personal perception of what our habits are. A person with a weak character will not recognize that their habits are bad, while a person of stronger character will recognize they are partaking in bad habits, but simply don’t know how to change them yet.
There are three things that contribute to our character and habits. Let’s look at them and how they play a role.
Heredity – While it is true that you cannot choose your family, it’s also true that you can be aware of any influence they have. If their influence is negative you’ll have to be firm when they try to tempt you into bad habits. That doesn’t mean you should stop loving them or ignore them, but be aware of their influence on you.
Our families contribute to the make-up of our character. How can you get rid of the bad ones? It will take some effort as you can’t change your genetics. In a moment we will look at other areas that are more in your control.
For now, choose to focus more on your family’s positive influences and downplay the negative ones. This way you’ll be thankful for the good traits you have inherited and be able to put them to work for you.
Environment – When it comes to character, your environment can play a huge role. Environment doesn’t just refer to your physical surroundings, but also your social.
Physical surroundings have an influence on our habits and character, but not as big as you may think. Many great people have lived in terrible surroundings. War, poverty and suppression were not able to stop some of the world’s best people.
They prove that your surroundings can actually build character by making you stronger. And this is where habits really come in. If you have poor mental habits, you can let sub-par surroundings effect you negatively – using them as an excuse for failure. However, if your habits are strong and positive you have the power to manifest great character. Just as a blacksmith uses heat to harden steel, so too can a great person use a bad environment to better themselves.
That covers the physical, but what about our social environment? This is probably the biggest area of influence in our lives. Let’s face it, we choose to hang around with these people. Take a step back and look objectively at who you think your friends are.
Do they have the same moral compass as you? Do they encourage you to do things you know you really shouldn’t? Do they ridicule you when you try to do better? Perhaps your friends are a good influence, perhaps not. Just look at your closest friends and you will get a good idea of the person you are now, or will soon be. If that doesn’t fit in with your vision of achievement, then you will want to broaden your circle of friends to include the right kind of people.
Education – In this sense, education refers to the things we learn. Obviously, this means it’s not limited to the things we learn in school. We also learn a lot from experience and circumstance. In a way it’s education that really molds our habits and character. And that’s good news, too, because you can then also educate yourself to develop better habits and character.
Reading is an excellent way to do this. Fill your mind with good things and put what you learn into action. However, you can also re-educate yourself by being open to new experiences. Ask yourself what you need to do to change a bad habit, or what you could do to build character. Often the answers lie within us, if we are willing to be honest with ourselves.
However you define success, when it comes to achievement a strong and good character is vital. Habits, god or bad, are a reflection of character. Finding the areas of influence in your life will help you develop the character you need to move ahead and become successful.
