The thing that humans crave most in life is success: success in business, success in employment, success in sports and success in everything.
But to most people, success keeps on eluding them, slipping through their fingers like bubbles. What makes success so slippery, so elusive and so tricky in the very same world where it seems easy to others? It is more or less like that there is a special breed of people who whatever they touch results in success, whatever they say attracts positive comments and support and whatever they do sets rules for a new world order. The fact of life is that there is no inborn difference between the successful and the less successful. What differentiates them is how they go about in the pursuit of success.
Graham Jones writing in the Harvard Business Review gives us a glance on success. Jones says that elite performers do not get distracted by the victories of competitors. If you give up easily just because others seem to have outcompeted you in what you believe you are the best, then success will always elude you. The success formula will never be compete if you fail to realise that you will not always win most of the time. Success is the path that snakes through valleys and mountains of ups and downs. What we cherish in successful people is a mere iceberg of the failures and pains they have endured in life. In fact, we would not have noticed them the moments they failed until they became successful.
To be successful then you need to have an appetite for getting feedback no matter how it hurts you. Self-awareness is the cornerstone in the path of success. Jones teaches that superstars have an insatiable appetite for honest, immediate feedback. But it must be constructive; stars do not engage in self-flagellation. Come to terms with feedback on your leadership style, your performance, your writing, your language and your association. It is feedback that shapes you into a diamond.
In a bid to build your own success formula, it is imperative to note that success comes in when you challenge conventional thinking. Be prepared to break the rules, be prepared to do the extraordinary. If you follow what other people do and believe in what they believe, then you will never amount to become extraordinary. You will end up being average. People that break records firstly believed that they could be the ones to set the new record. Challenge beliefs.
It is on record that until 1964 most people believed that a human being was incapable of running a mile in less than four minutes. But that very year, English Roger Bannister proved them wrong.
This is what Bannister says: “Doctors and scientists said that breaking the four-minute record was impossible, that one would die in the attempt. Thus when I got up from the track after collapsing at the finish line, I figured I was dead.”
If he had not attempted to break the belief, he could not have broken the record which eventually resulted in more people breaking records as he had made it possible. No one should tell you what you cannot do.
The capabilities you have are beyond their comprehension. Actually, the more you challenge yourself, the more you realise that you have greatness within you, that you were born an achiever, that you have more resources than you ever thought you had. It is only you who can make a date with destiny. Your key to excellence is not in your physical strength, academic accolades, ability to dribble or score goals. Your key to success is in your mental toughness. What will distinguish you from the rest is how you cope with pressure in business or personal life, how you never give up when everybody else starts saying that it is impossible. Your key to success is your ability to soldier on despite the circumstances, the ability to believe in yourself and that no one else but you are the one to realise the dream you have set. You are the one, believe you are, act like one and you will be the one.
Stewart Chibanda says: “Do what you can with what you have, where you are. Do not blame the environment; do not curse what you have.”
American author Wallace Wattles inspires us even further when he says “do simple things in a great way”.
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