Success arrives before success arrives. It isn’t a play on words (or maybe it is). Success starts from the inside out. It begins with a change in our habits and with learning certain skills, but above all it is achieved through our attitude. Sometimes it also comes by sheer chance, but that kind of success rarely lasts. Are there universal truths that can help us here? Let’s take a look.
Whether we are talking about business, our career or any other goal we have set ourselves in life, keeping these universal truths in mind won’t guarantee success, but it will make it more likely.
1. Your past does not dictate your future
The biggest problem we see in people is that they carry a very heavy backpack. They don’t use past experiences as lessons and as a way to build their abilities, but as brakes.
Today you are someone who lives in place “X” and works in place “Y”. You are in a relationship with person “Z”, or you are not in a relationship at all. If, when you stop to think about it, you conclude that you are not happy with your life, remember that you are living exactly the life you decided to live, and that you can start taking the necessary steps to change it whenever you want.
Spare us the “but I come from a very poor family… if I were the president’s son, I’d have more chances to…” speech.
The truth is that if you were the president’s son, you would probably be the same unhappy jerk, just in a “president’s son” version.
As Bill Gates himself is said to have put it: “Being born poor is not your fault; dying poor is.” The same goes for idiocy.
(Recommended: How to radically change your life)
2. Whatever you do, you are going to die
There is no greater truth than this. With or without success, poor or rich, we are all going to die, unless Google’s futurist-in-chief quickly cracks the secret of immortality, and even if he does, it won’t be within everyone’s budget.
But knowing that you are going to die should not become an excuse for defeatism, for spending your life as a slacker, getting drunk and smoking joints all day. It should be remembered the way Steve Jobs remembered it in his famous Stanford commencement speech: knowing that you will die one day is the best reminder that there is no reason to be afraid of trying something and fighting for what you want to achieve. Fighting for your financial dreams, for becoming a great entrepreneur, for the girl (or guy) you like.
See also: The discipline of saying no
You’ll try some things; you’ll fail at some and succeed at others. Either way, you are going to die someday. So why be afraid of failure?
(See: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s rules for succeeding at whatever you set out to do)
3. Identify your problems, but put all your energy into the solution
It may sound like very obvious, well-worn advice, but every day people talk and talk about everything that makes their lives miserable, and you never see them racking their brains for strategies and solutions to those problems.
We have to change the way we think and focus on what really matters. I usually give an example that people don’t much like, but it is the best way to tackle the subject.
When I started at a new secondary school, the resident bully tried to make my life miserable. One day the bully accidentally fell down the stairs, and I never saw him within 10 metres of me again. I was told it wasn’t the right thing to do, but it worked. I was told that wasn’t how you solve things, but things got solved.
Problems turn up in life as little “monsters”, and you have to get rid of those monsters before they grow into giants. You’ll be surprised at the results you get if you focus your attention on solutions rather than living in constant worry.
And we are not talking about going around pushing people down the stairs (obviously), but about thinking of ways to solve the problems that can be solved. Because, with a few exceptions, most problems have a solution.
4. Success is determined by actions
If success were defined by our knowledge and skills, most people would be successful, because information and knowledge are within anyone’s reach. Yet the truth is that many highly knowledgeable people never quite achieve success.
What you know is worth nothing; what counts is what you do. How good you are at something is worth nothing; what counts is what you do with your skills.
They say successful people are decisive, but a decision isn’t real until you act on it. Until you take action and start moving in the right direction, it is as if you hadn’t decided anything at all.
Successful people are people of action. They don’t just talk, they don’t spend their lives planning. They act and they do, forcefully and consistently.
5. The quality of your life is proportional to the quality of your relationships
If your circle is made up only of people who talk about nothing but politics and football, you had better go into politics (if you are over 22 and still not a professional footballer, you never will be), because that circle probably won’t give you much.
If you want to succeed in finance, you’ll need to surround yourself with people who can offer you their perspective on finance. Having business owners in your circle is the best way to succeed in business. In short, having people who are smarter than us in our circle will make us smarter.
If your circle is full of negative people, even sunny days will look grey. If, on the other hand, you are surrounded by cheerful, positive people, you’ll find reasons to smile even in adversity.
Remember that nobody succeeds on their own. The self-made man doesn’t exist, because that man is made of little pieces of other people.
(See: The 50-30-20 rule for success in your career or business)
6. Difficulties are a gift
As soon as you step out of your comfort zone, you’ll see problems and difficulties pile up. It follows that more difficulties are experienced by people who are trying to grow. You will often have heard people say they want to become civil servants for stability and zero headaches, or that they don’t want to start a business for fear of uncertainty.
People who are determined to reach their goals look adversity in the face, without a doubt, and prepare themselves to deal with difficulties.
So if you are fighting for your goals, remember that every time you face a problem or a setback, it is because you are moving further from your comfort zone and closer to your objectives. You just have to get past the obstacles. Bear in mind that people who have decided to stay in their comfort zone will never come across them.
As Think and Grow Rich explains, before success comes into a person’s life, that person will meet temporary defeat and perhaps some failure. When defeat and failure overtake someone, the easiest and most logical thing to do is to stop trying and give up. That is what most people do, and that is why so many people never achieve success.
7. Start with what you have and build your success from there
Some people don’t do something because they don’t have the money. Others don’t do it because they don’t have the time. Others because they think it isn’t the right moment.
The point is that we will always find an excuse. A lack of resources to carry out an idea is not a barrier. Many entrepreneurs know that a lack of resources was a blessing in disguise that made them more creative and allowed them to build a profitable, stable company precisely because of it.
The truth is that, statistically, if we give an entrepreneur all the resources they think they need, we are guaranteeing their failure.
The moment to start doing what we want, or need, to do is right now. The means and resources we need are exactly the ones we have. As we shape our business idea or project, the means will come.
Set a goal, plan a strategy to achieve it, start right now with what you have and keep moving forward. That is how things get done.
8. Focus on your strengths and “forget” your weaknesses
If you focus on improving everything you are not good at, you’ll most likely end up frustrated. You can be a complete disaster at many things and excellent at a couple. Focus on that couple, because you can always delegate the rest to people who are good at the skills you lack.
It isn’t true that you can do anything you set your mind to. As a motivational speech it’s fine, but it isn’t very pragmatic when it comes to putting it into practice, because the reality is that if you enter a field you haven’t mastered, you will be beaten by someone whose skills lie in that field.
A second-division footballer is more likely to win the first-division league than to win the world tennis championship.
And these, basically, are the principles we should never forget. We could add the importance of focusing only on what matters, which is an art in itself and something we will talk about in future articles, as well as the importance of knowing when to keep going and when it is better to give up.
Because sometimes the message of being persistent and never giving up, when it is twisted, is very dangerous, and it has led to big losses that could have been avoided.
But in my opinion, one of the most important things, and something we see all the time, is that most people don’t really know what they want to achieve in life. And of course, however fast you run or however much you do, if you don’t know where you want to go, you will hardly succeed at something “you didn’t know you wanted to achieve”.
See also: The 6 areas of your life you must master to control your own destiny
Featured image: Txllxt TxllxT, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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