Actually, I have a bit of a problem with my own title of, “How to be Successful” because everybody in their own right way is already successful, maybe you just don’t realize it yet. There is literally an infinite amount of ways that you can define what constitutes being “successful” and each and every person you ask this question to will give you a different answer.
Since I’m not the type of person to go digging around for things in an infinite pool, no matter what you define as success or how to become successful can be achieved by some universal ways of thinking, acting and feeling. Once you tune in to some of the patterns that seem to cultivate success and that many people that we view as successful have, then you will quickly find that everything is well within your reach.
Step 1
DO what YOU love! There are so many people on this planet who have tremendous passion for so many things but throw it out of the window, all in the pursuit of money. I can tell you a lot of reasons why you should never take this route, primarily because you are going to end up a bitter and unpleasant person due to your constant search to find happiness. Once you find what makes you happy, you’ve found the part of your soul that is just screaming out, “THIS IS WHO I AM!” and the more you deny who you are, the more miserable you will be.
The things we love and are passionate and enthusiastic about come naturally to us which means if we were to do them for a living or even a hobby, it would be pleasant and enjoyable and feel a lot less like “work” which would leave us more productive in that chosen field.
And productivity is one of the largest keys and part of the statement of “how to be successful” that you can ever imagine. If you are more inclined to work harder at something because you see the value in what you are doing, then needless to say you are going to pour your heart, soul, blood, sweat and tears into that project. You’ll become emotionally invested into it and see that project or profession you do until you’ve built it to be the best thing you could ever imagine.
There’s something almost captivating that occurs to a human being when they find what they believe to be their purpose in life as suddenly everything just “matters” to them. Everything that has your name attached to it instinctively has a higher value and sense of urgency attached to it that you feel nobody can ever come close to matching. It’s as if your product or your service becomes a child and you slowly but delicately evolve it into being the best that it could ever be.
People aren’t dumb and they will see the pride and the value you give into your work. Your passion and your enthusiasm is a giveaway and people will be able to either see right into, or through that. When you take pride and value in what you do, no matter what it might be, it’s just going to be better. This is something you’ve had an experience with already if you think about; if you can recall the subjects you hated and despised the most in school – what were you grades like? Even if you had to force yourself to get outstanding grades I bet you hated every moment behind it even though you achieve a good grade. It probably felt like a huge uphill battle that you needed to win by crawling tooth and nail to get to the top. If you think back to a moment to the subjects or hobbies that you loved doing, did it even feel like work or a chore? I doubt it. The things that we love seem to come so naturally to us that when we’re doing them, we enjoy them so much that it doesn’t even feel like a requirement, or something that we have to do in order to become successful. We just do these things because we love doing them.
There are always those people who won’t ever do what they love because they fear the salary is too low or not worth their skill level or time. That’s nothing but a disease that exists in your mind that does you a huge injustice towards finding success and happiness. While it’s true that when you first start out in any new field or career that your services won’t be valued that highly despite what confidence you have in yourself and your abilities; you need to cultivate a track record and a proven history of success in order to show and demonstrate to other people why you are the best or why they should hire you.
You should never have to sell anything in your life. If you find that you spend the majority of your life selling things to people, then you need to stop selling and start solving, because all of the best solutions for people will lead them gravitating back to you for your product or service. It’s all about the relationship also, you can find yourself dealing with a lot of nasty and unpleasant people if you spent all of your time selling to them instead of solving. Positioning yourself and your services in a way that will help them to personally connect and identify with you will help you to create a certain kind of relationship that extends far beyond just “the sale” and is how you naturally grow and expand your business the way it should be done – by providing a quality service and product that has a snowball effect among all of your clients and customers. Distinguishing yourself as different and having different and out of the ordinary but extremely effective solutions to problems is going to get you noticed and propel you to the top of your chosen field or career. Even if you work in a market or field that is extremely saturated and drastically impact by harsh economic times, there are still people regardless of these circumstances who are looking for YOUR product or service and you can bring to you by staying at the top of your game, being passionate about what you do all while working to serve the best interests of your clients and customers, not your own financial goals.
Stop worrying about the salary you will make and start worrying how you can increase your influence, build a better product or service and then the money will follow. I’ll get to why this happens in more detail in a bit
Step 2
If we can sum up Step 1 of how to be successful, we should say that the first step towards this new realization and awareness is to first identify what we love to do and do it regardless of how much the associated and attached salary rates to that job or role are. We need to focus more on delivering quality and value and then potential clients and customers will come to us, money in hand, for our premium solution.
So what’s next in how to be successful? Glad you asked!
The next step is to turn the focus inwards towards yourself for a moment. Each and every single person, I don’t care who you are, where you come from or how much money you earn right now has a special and unique skill or set of skills that differentiate you from everybody else. I get a lot of people who don’t have confidence in themselves enough to come to grips with how talented they really were and their intense sense of humbleness is flattering but not very productive for them.
Nobody knows you better then yourself, and while other people can tell you what they believe you are good at (and believe me, they will) it’s up to you to realize this and own this realization for yourself. Once you’ve accomplished this, you need to find a good way of expressing your abilities. Whether you work for wages or for yourself, you need to start thinking the best way to deliver your true talents, abilities and skills to other people. Perhaps you work for a company and you want to start your own business, or vice versa but whatever the case may be you need to begin thinking of all of the different ways you can start turning your skills into products and services for others. By following the outline given in Step 1, it will have you more then on your way to being successful and happy.
If you want to know a little bit of a secret, a lot of people tend to get hung up on the money aspects of things. You’ll find millions of people who are extraordinarily gifted who work for great companies, but they are miserable because they want to branch out and do their own thing, however, they are terribly afraid and full of fear. Crossing this bridge is tough and you need to turn inwards and really ask yourself what you want – wages or your own business? Undoubtedly you must have friends very similar to you and ones that collectively could contribute and enhance your skills in such a fashion that it could make a business between all of you much more possible and much less scary.
Step 3
Step 3 in how to be successful is all about your mental attitude. Without a positive and solid mental attitude, you aren’t going to go anywhere fast – guaranteed. I know what you’re expecting to hear, that we need to stay positive, focused and motivated etc. The truth is, unless you’ve struggled with how hard doing these things can be, and what is required of you physically, emotionally and mentally to carry these states of mind to your success then grasping and understand the full depth of them is almost unimaginable. If we take a moment to revisit Step 1 again, then that step tells us if we pick a line of work which we are passionate about, then it’s not like work at all. Think about that for a second, picking something we love to do is going to give us an advantage, because it’s going to automatically tear down most of the fear, worrying, anxiety and other barriers that could otherwise exist.
When it’s suddenly not “just work” anymore and we become personally involved and tied to it because it is something we love, we are less inclined to give up so easily and be defeated. You’ll find that struggling with seeing things to fulfillment become a lot less of a problem when you’re doing what you love because it’s your passion and your purpose. The most successful people you’ll ever meet don’t ever usually worry about the money because they understand that the money comes as a natural byproduct of providing an extremely valuable product or service. If you stay fixated on the money then I can almost guarantee you are going to fail, because working towards money as an end is shallow and not sustainable because without a solid product or service backing it up, money is fleeting and has no way to replenish itself. If you company is built around greed and milking or scamming people out of their hard-earned money then everything you company produces product and service wise as well as its own personal image is going to reflect that – and people will see right through this and you might find yourself out of business quicker then you can think.
Step 4
Developing a healthy body and mind go hand in hand with how to be successful. Think about it, your body is the vehicle and way in which you express yourself to the world, why would you want this wonderful and beautiful body of yours not functioning in its highest capacity? Do you think it’s going to be productive and lead you to success having your body only running on 20, 30 or 50% of its total capacity?
Then you’ll agree with me that it only makes sense that we train, condition and give our bodies all that they need to ensure that we’re thinking clearly, focused and healthy. The best way to start this is your diet. ABSOLUTELY forget any type of food that is high in fats, sugar and, well, you know the deal; hearing this all again is going to be redundant, however what I will say is this: if you owned a Lamborghini would you put low grade fuel such as 87 or 89 octane into that engine? What the hell do you think would happen to that car’s engine if you were to use low quality gasoline, fuel and oils?
All of these principles apply towards your body as well. Fast foods, junk food and most of the package and other types of foods that we get from our local markets that are processed are just destroying us from the inside out and putting us at an extreme disadvantage. This has a lot more to do then just pure issues of weigh or obesity, we’re talking about your levels of rational and cognitive function here – there’s no reason to not be working at your best. I’m not saying you need to go out and become vegan, but taking the effort to incorporate more fresh fruits and vegetables into your diet is going to help you to become successful in the long run.
I always love the person who will counter argue with the point, “well, I am busy all day and have no time to eat like that!”. Well, guess what? I bet if you started thinking of your diet as part of your overall blueprint and plan of how to be successful then your attitude will change. It’s all about perspective, and by god if you have to include eating an excellent diet into your business plan, then do it – no questions asked because that’s going to be such a huge factor and influence on your overall success because it will bring you to enjoy higher states of energy and make you less prone to the ups, downs, moods and emotions of life as a whole.
The next part in this step of how to be successful: sleep. This is right up there with food, and I am just as guilty as everybody else in that I work about 12-16 hours per week at my business roughly 6-7 days a week; this is because I already found my passion and I don’t mind those hours, I actually love and enjoy my work and I have no problems doing it. On an upside, I can turn around and take a month off and my business would still produce for me, that’s just what I wanted to create and it was extremely important for me to have that so I included that into my plan for success. I suppose there will be a day that will come when I can afford to back off more and begin to enjoy the fruits of my labor more, but in all honesty I am not even worried about that during the present moment because I know there still has to be a lot more work done.
Step 5
By the way, how’s your personality? Your personality is a huge part of how to be successful because just like your body, it’s a prominent way of how you express yourself to the world. If you are an extremely pleasant and charming person to be around, you’ll find that networking (which is such a huge part of success) will come naturally to you and that all of your relations with your clients, customers and staff will go that much more smoothly and serve in your best interests of expansion. People prefer and LOVE to work with people who they deem as pleasant, loving, generous and kind – after all, wouldn’t you love to work with a company, owner or business person who embodied all of these traits?
Taking the time to cultivate your personality and learn how to have better interactions with people is crucial and vital to your success. Learning how to be a better public speaker as well as a writer who can clearly and concisely transmute their thoughts to paper is going to make you more well off then you can ever begin to understand. Also, learning how to become one who has a way with words and can clearly articulate is especially important.
On a special note, I am not talking about developing a “fake” personality here, because quite frankly, people can smell this bullshit from more then a mile away. It takes great courage to be comfortable in your own skin, therefore, it takes even more courage to become confident with yourself. If you feel you are lacking in one area, don’t over compensate for that with a fake personality because you are going to drive people away from you so fast it’ll make your head spin. We tend to be a lot more transparent then we think, and although we never hear from those close to us their opinions, you can be certain of the fact that if you leave a bad impression on somebody that it will detract and take away from your success and overtime this can accumulate and become a terrible thing to have to deal with on both personal and professional levels.
You don’t have to fool anybody – if you come off sounding, looking or giving the impression of being extremely fake then that is the message you are conveying about your products and services. Find out who you really are and build from there, you’ll quickly find you have all of the tools you need to be successful in this area and it’s easier then you might have thought in the past. People are extremely sensitive to impressions, especially first ones and it can be difficult to readjust how you come off to people once you give a bad one on the first shot.
Step 6
This perhaps the most important step, but it can only be realized which you collectively bring together and master the first 5 steps. If you truly and deeply want to know how to be successful, then these points are the greatest insight anybody can ever give to you.
Naturally, while you are out developing yourself in whichever way you want to in order to become successful in the manner in which you define it, you will notice that some things just “work” while others don’t. It seems so simple to say this, but it’s the truth: once you find what works, you have to then scale that into the size you want and desire. Scaling yourself and your results involves a lot of volume, and it involves a formula for success.
Once you figure out what works, you just need to duplicate those results as many times as it takes to see the results you want. Any factory is a great example of this, they found out through trial, error and a lot of testing what works and what doesn’t and when they finally got their formula for their best products and services figured out, they just simply scale it until they meet the goals they have set forth for themselves.
To tie the previous steps in going forward with this, the products that these factories make only go as far as the demand the people have for them. If you come out with a product that looks great but turns out to be smoke and mirrors, meaning there was a lot of hype but no value in anything, then those factory doors will shut so quickly you might even get stuck inside before you have a chance to run out of those big doors.
Volume is where a lot of people get hung up. They have outstanding products and services but they have no true way of delivering these things in volume because they often involve some type of business or a lot of money to start a way in which they can deliver these products and services – then all of the excuses start flowing about how and why they can’t do anything because they’re broke.
Honestly, if you have faith in yourself and what you can deliver then you don’t need to worry about these things. The quickest, simplest and fastest way to do these things would be to go out and start a website. Hell, even if you started a simple blog about why you are the best driveway sealer in the world – who knows what that can lead to? Learning some basics about things like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can take your business a very long way and it will seem like your competition is just suddenly shrinking away as more and more people start seeking you out for what solutions you can present to them.
No matter on how small of a scale you begin your business or whatever else it is you’re looking to do, when you are great at what you do that will begin to spread like wild fire and suddenly you might find yourself in the perfect scenario of being immersed in what you love. Like always attracts like, and if you love genuinely doing your work and working with whatever it is that you do, then you are going to inherently attract more people, events and circumstances that will allow you continue on with doing what you love.
Step 7
This is where a lot of people succeed and they do this either consciously or unconscious of this simple fact. We’ve got to pay our old friend money a visit and take a good, long hard look at it and begin to yet again tie some of the previous steps into this one also.
You should focus less on money and keep having faith that as long as you keep on doing what you love, then you’ll attract as much money as you’ll ever need as a byproduct of your excellent products and services. Over the years, I’ve found it to be true that you can only make as much money as the total amount of value you are providing to either your boss or your clients.
The ironic part about this is that whatever your wages are, you are prescribing and assigning them to yourself. In a sense, you are determining what you are worth and working towards those wages. A lot of unhappiness can be found because people fool themselves into thinking that they love what they do when they are really unhappy; a balancing act between your emotions, mental state and your six figure salary then takes place and you won’t ever win that battle until you pony up and move on to doing what you love. Initially you may take a huge reduction in pay but that balances out and fixes over time. Thinking like a farmer is what I love to always do, because the seeds you are sowing and planting today aren’t going to grow tomorrow but you need to have faith and know how to be successful – you need to know that which you are planting today will grow tomorrow as long as you stick with it over time and nurture it correctly.
If you don’t want to reinvent your career and your profession then start doing things that will warrant an increase in your wages. Show more responsibility, leadership or other desirable traits that your company is looking in its employees and good results will follow. These tactics don’t only apply to people who own businesses, they can apply to anybody in any line of work or duty. If you want to move up in any way, then you need to give the people with the power to promote you or your position a reason to do this. It’s unreasonable to sit back and demand more money when the value and the output you contribute to your company doesn’t reflect what you are really doing. I see all the time people will say things along the lines of, “I’ve been working this profession for 20 years! I know everything, and my salary deserves to be a reflect of my time spent into this profession!”. That’s all fine and dandy, 20 years is a long time and to some extent I don’t doubt that your employer is in some way reflecting into your salary all of that time, but you can’t justify a six figure salary just based on the amount of years you’ve been working that profession, especially if all of those years haven’t been with one company.
In other words, you need to show good reason why you are worth the salary you want. You can make all of those statements, but if you are lazy or not exceeding the expectations upon you then you’re going to stay stagnant for a very, very long time. Expectations are important and you should always stride to exceed them at all costs. Going the extra mile, producing the extra volume and going above and beyond is what is going to separate you from all of the rest. One thing that is true, anybody who is successful has always gone the extra mile and that’s a universal truth.
If you still don’t know how to be successful, stop worrying about how much money you can make and start worrying about how you can improve what you have to offer product and service wise to your clients and customers. Money cannot sustain anything in and of itself, it needs to have the backing of something valuable, just as we saw with the earlier examples of the factories and the one just now about working for wages. The amount of money you make will be a reflection of the overall quality and quantity of the products and services you produce and distribute to the world; the length and the duration in which you continue to generate your profits is also strictly dependent about the overall quality and quantity of your products and services also.
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