Whether we are talking about business, finance, our career or life in general, we won’t be able to skip certain steps, such as sacrifice, effort and constant discipline. Nobody is going to spare you the sleepless nights, the hours of learning every day and plenty of racking your brains.
If there is one thing we know today, it is that some people succeed and others don’t because successful people have been willing to do many uncomfortable things that the people who ended up stumbling into failure were not willing to do.
Still, although we can’t avoid walking the road, we can find some shortcuts, which we will call success accelerators.
1. Follow a model
The surest way to learn and accelerate success is to learn from someone who is already successful in the field you want to play in.
It often happens that most of the people around us are doing “what you’re supposed to do”, and as a rule we are doing the same. One thing is clear: we are not going to succeed by doing the same as the people who are “battling away” in their comfort zone.
So if you don’t have good role models, find someone who is the best in their field and try to emulate them. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel or be especially creative. Simply learn from the best, copy the best.
Luckily, you don’t need to travel to Wall Street or Silicon Valley to learn from Warren Buffett or Steve Jobs. Today, thanks to the biographies of these entrepreneurs, we can get inside the heads of these geniuses, find out how they think and what led them to success. In my opinion, some books are better than going to university. To give three examples:
- Steve Jobs, the biography by Walter Isaacson
- Losing My Virginity, by Richard Branson
- Aprendiendo de los mejores (Learning from the best), by Francisco Alcaide
2. Ask someone for help
Apart from the odd isolated case, nobody achieves success alone. Ask someone to help you. Whatever you want in life, someone has already figured out how to get it. Although you often hear that “the best way to learn is through mistakes”, believe me, if someone can clear a few obstacles from our path, that is also a fast way to learn.
If at some point we have to crash into a wall, so be it, but going looking for a wall to crash into is not the right thing to do if someone can help us get over it.
If you find out how that person did it, or they explain to you what you can do better and how, drawing on their own experiences, you will save yourself time and pain. Above all time, which is the most valuable resource we have in this life.
First of all, find out how you can help that person and add value to their life. When a mentor chooses a protégé, it is because the protégé they have chosen is adding value in one way or another. That way you are more likely to get their help.
(See: 7 lessons for success from the commander who hunted down Bin Laden)
3. Follow the clues to success
Success leaves clues. Some people believe you can go from zero to a billion overnight, but that never happens.
People who are consistently successful are undoubtedly doing something different from everyone else. They have a strategy that works. They take steps in the right directions. They plant a kind of seed that bears fruit later.
So all you have to do is plant those same seeds, and you will probably end up reaping the same fruit.
See also: The most successful people in the world have these 7 things in common
Featured image: Ludwig Sebastian Micheler, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
