The number one reason why people do not get what they want out of life is because they do not know what they want. What is your definition of success? Before you can achieve success you need to define what success means to you. Without a clear vision of what success means to you, you cannot work towards it, and therefore you can never claim to have achieved it.
Highly successful people share this one common trait; they all have written down explicitly defined goals and objectives for their lives. The remainder of the generally mediocre majority wish to be successful, but since they do not have clearly defined goals, they have nothing specifically to strive for nor any measure to evaluate their results.
Highly successful people are decisive in their thinking and action orientated by nature. They live according to a plan. Unsuccessful people are typically indecisive, have no clear action plan to commit to, and will typically just drift through life aimlessly.
If you consider yourself to be falling short of your expectations, then this differentiating factor might just lie at the root of your constraint – have you written down explicitly defined goals and objectives for your life?
A further distinguishing attribute of successful people is this: Successful people commit towards their goals. Unsuccessful people will typically be overwhelmed by their problems and the obstacles preventing them from reaching out for their dreams. In so doing they habitually close off opportunities in their lives. They do wishing for things, but before they can proceed to work out an action plan in order to obtain it, self doubt or a negative outlook on life prevent them from going beyond mere wishing, leave alone commitment, and most definitively no action.
Success is not an accident, nor is it a privilege for the lucky few. Success is not a matter of luck, but rather the predetermined outcome of specific behaviour. It is the result of a process of defining your desired success, planning the process required in order to produce those results, and then committing your life to this plan in the pursuit of success. Based on the Law of Cause and Effect, if you plan for the attainment of your goals, and you go out and create those results, success will then depend upon the outcome of your focused efforts and not upon luck.
Therefore, define your measure of success in terms of all the major aspects of your life: Career, Skills, Health, Social/Relationships and Financial. Stephen R. Covey states that the elements that make up a successful life are the ability to live, to love, to learn and to leave a legacy.
Do not measure yourself against the material possessions of others, but rather against your own level of self actualisation for each of the key areas of your life. Success is more synonymous with happiness (fulfilment & contentment) then with affluence. Happiness stems from the ability to hope for things, and achieve them. It stems from not having anxiety caused by lack, but rather to have abundance, and ultimately to be able to enrich the lives of other people. In order to live a truly successful life, you must make sure that your ultimate goals will make you happy and content; else they will merely frustrate you and not contribute towards your success.
It is beyond the scope of this session to discuss the techniques used to define your Mission and your Goals. These will be covered in Parts 5 & 6.
For now you must understand the following:
- Success cannot be built upon luck. An endeavour where you have no control over the outcome can therefore not be considered to be part of success planning.
- Success is unique for each person. Have your own unique definition of what you will define a successful life to be.
- Success – a State of Mind. In the next issue we will look into the state of mind that sets successful people apart from the rest of the pack.