How often do you think about your life? Do you believe that you are living life to its fullest potential? Most of us don’t often think about this! The truth for some of us is that we don’t want to think about it in the first place. It is because we know, we won’t like the answer. But if you want success in life, this is a question that you have to keep asking yourself.
What is Success?
What does success in life necessarily mean? Everyone will have a different answer to this. It is a very subjective term. It simply can’t be the opposite of failure. Many people haven’t failed but aren’t successful as well.
Success, in general, is not a specific term! So how do we make it particular? You can do it by defining what you want to be successful in! So for example, if it’s about a relationship, you have to define which aspects of your relationship you are looking to improve. When you improve on them, that’s when you can say you are ‘successful’.
Is Happiness the Ultimate Success?
What do you think about this? What does success bring you? Happiness? Or is it something else? If you think about it, success largely means being happy. When you succeed in something, for the most part, you are happy about it!
Now you will be wondering, who might be unhappy after winning? Well, think again. Success doesn’t necessarily have result in happiness. It doesn’t even have to be contentment. It just needs to be a purpose. For example, take two cyclists. Both are competing against each other in the Olympics and the tall guy wins. Naturally, you would think that the tall guy has succeeded and he will be very happy.But that’s simply not the case. Adding some context to the theory, what if the tall guy and the short guy are real brothers and the short guy has been practising his whole life for this competition? This completely changes the whole equation of happiness. Even though the tall guy has succeeded, he might not be happy that his little brother lost.
This was just an example with some context. Success is not directly related to happiness. You can succeed in a lot of things, but that doesn’t have to make you happy. You succeed, you put efforts into the task ahead of you not because you want to be happy or content, but because it is your purpose. Succeeding is your responsibility.
Why Aren’t You Succeeding?
To be honest, you know why you are not succeeding, but since you need to keep listening to the reason from others, here it is. You are not putting in the efforts!
That’s what the whole game is about. At the end of the day, it is not about who is more talented or god gifted, but it’s about who puts in more effort. Whom do you think will win amongst the two basketball players – a) Person who is talented and practice 50 shots a day or b) Person who is not talented but practice 500 shots a day?
In 10 out of 10 scenarios its the second person. Simply because he puts in more effort. Now you might be thinking – Tanay, it is such an obvious thing, why did you waste your time writing this and our time making us read it? Keep reading ahead and you will find out.
Smartness is Overrated and Underrated!
What do you know about being smart? Is being smart something that comes naturally to you? Are you one of those high IQ people who don’t need to put efforts into being smart?
And If you are smart, are you successful yet? The thing about being smart is, it won’t matter much if you can’t execute your ideas. There are a lot of people who are smarter than most of the CEO’s of today’s 500 fortune companies, but they aren’t successful (supposing that here success is measured as being a CEO of a 500 fortune company).
Why do you think that is?
The problem doesn’t lie in their smartness, it lies in overthinking. Smart people can find problems and loopholes with almost every idea they have. This is why a large percentage of them never execute their ideas and move on to some other thing. Over time, this turns into laziness and laziness isn’t exactly the key to being successful. This is how smartness is overrated.
Not everyone at the top is smart, they are just consistent and don’t fear to fail. They keep putting in the efforts. Success in life is only achieved when you realise that you don’t need to be god gifted or very smart to do big things. You just have to keep moving and with time, you will learn all the smartness you need to by being dumb in the first place.
But, Smartness is also underrated at the same time.
When you just keep working hard and don’t learn from your mistakes, you are being dumb. It is not a problem if you aren’t born with high IQ, but it is a problem when you don’t apply common sense.
Yes, the most successful people aren’t the most intelligent ones, but they are not vanilla stupid as well. They work hard, but they know when they need to work hard and for what they have to work hard. Some people only work hard blindly. You have to learn from your mistakes and if you aren’t, you won’t win. It is really stupid! When you have a brain, why not use it if you are putting in efforts?
Are Successful People Motivated?
This is something we all need to understand. Motivation doesn’t come out of thin air. A lot of people keep waiting the whole of their lives for the magical boost/motivation to do something big. They have the idea, they have it in them what it takes to execute the idea, but they just don’t do it.
When you ask them why; they will tell you that they aren’t just motivated enough.
The problem is that motivation doesn’t work like that. It won’t come till the time you start executing. This is exactly opposite of what people think about motivation. When you have a clear idea about where you are going and how that is changing your life, you start feeling motivated to push more and do a better job.
For example, the person who completed his 100km run started from 10km, maybe 5km. From their first run, they got the belief and motivation for accomplishing more than what they just did. If they had thought that someday something will spring up inside them and they will run a 100km someday without first going for shorter runs, they would never do it.
So coming to the point, for being highly motivated, you need to start small. Starting small and getting the taste of being in the right direction is what brings motivation.
For tasting even a hint of success in life, you need to start. However small, don’t wait for the motivation to come from outside. It is present inside you, just explore it.
Role Of Education
Many of the entrepreneurs you meet will tell you that you don’t have to get an education to be successful. What they mean is, you don’t need to learn from textbooks from school. Education isn’t all about learning from your school, its about paying attention to life.
Being aware of the things around you is one of the best ways to ensure that you are always learning. This is a part of education.
Coming to the other part, textbook education helps as well. Look, no knowledge is bad for you. Get to learn as many things as possible and from as many sources available to you. If you have an opportunity to learn from a good school, do it.
You don’t have to ace your exams, but ensure that you are still learning new things every day from your textbooks. If you are going to enter the world of business, it won’t hurt you if you learnt economics and business subjects, but will only add to your perspective and understanding.
If you place an educated entrepreneur in a room with an uneducated entrepreneur, you will find that their approach towards solving things would be drastic, and in most cases, the guy with education will make more of smart decisions.
Does Social Roles Come Into Play?
For achieving success in life, does being social affect us? You bet it does. Your friend circle is a major component in determining whether you will succeed or not.
Don’t get me wrong, there have been exceptional cases of people who succeeded even though they had poor social peers. But as mentioned, these are ‘exceptions’. There is a quote, ‘Show me your friends and I will show you your future.’
There is a strong truth in this. At the same time, friendships can’t just be valued based on getting something out of them to succeed. It should be by heart, not mind. But it is just a good thing to be selective about your friends from the start. Because they can either lift you or drag you down.
What Makes You Unsuccessful?
Enough talking about how to get success in life, let’s talk about why you are unsuccessful. There can be a lot of reasons behind this. But when a group of people who felt as if they were unsuccessful were brought together and studied, the following things came out:
- False Beliefs – Most of these people had a lot of false beliefs. What are false beliefs? They are nothing but unrealistic things that you make up in your mind. If most of what you think is unrealistic to achieve, you will always feel like a loser.
- Control – One of the most common issues with all of them was that they were trying to control too much of the things outside of their realm. You have to understand the difference between what you can control and what you can’t. If you are trying too hard to get results to turn your way and not focusing on the process, then you are setting yourself up for a loss.
- Rigidity – Ever met a successful person who is not open to new changes? I haven’t! If you want to taste success in life, you have to stop being rigid. You have to be more flexible. This doesn’t mean that you should listen to others all the time. It simply means that even when you are strongly opinionated about something, be open enough to hear and consider what others have to say.
- Complaining – To tell you the truth, unsuccessful people are also the most ungrateful people. You will always find people who have been unsuccessful for the large part of their lives complaining all the time. They will complain about how they did not have the appropriate resources for succeeding.
- Low Confidence – In addition to all the points above, another one which makes sense is that low self-confidence can shatter your hopes of becoming successful. No one is born with the kind of confidence they have, even the most confident people feel nervous at times. Unsuccessful people don’t have a lot of confidence in their abilities to pull off a task and that is why they never do it in the first place.
Why You Are Never Going To Succeed?
If you read the question and got the answer before even I wrote it down here, it means that you know why you are not successful yet. If you want success in life, you need to be aware of where you stand currently.
Then with precision, you need to determine what will be your plan to reach your milestone. The reason why you will never really succeed is that you are lazy. That’s the truth we don’t want to face. Most of us are so lazy that even after knowing what we have to do, we won’t do it. We keep waiting for something to happen on its own.
Always remember, miracles only happen for those who dare to start. Even when you have a shitty plan, go out and execute it. What’s the worst thing that will happen? You will fail? But what have you got to lose? You will only learn!
Steve Jobs said that we all are already naked in front of life and one day we will die, so there is nothing else to lose. This is the truth that most of us need to remember and remind ourselves every day. The day we stop fearing to lose is the day we have taken our first step towards being successful.
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