What is Success ?
We must set our goals, objectives and trajectories based on what we desire, not what someone else wants for us.
Some people find that helping people brings them the most joy, and therefore success looks like a life given to others. Some realize that building a business or product brings them happiness. Some prefer isolation and others prefer constant activity.
The simple yet profound truth is that what makes me happy doesn’t make someone else happy, and vice versa. My vision of success probably looks nothing like yours, and that’s how it should be.
If we fail to define success for ourselves and try to pursue someone else’s path, we’ll end up frustrated, unhappy and ultimately feeling deeply unsuccessful. Bruce Lee said, “Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself; do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.”
I. How is the Journey of Success
The path to success begins by asking yourself, What makes me happy?
It’s also essential to understand that in many ways, we already are successful. If we assume that we are failures until we reach a specific goal, we will never be happy. We have to recognize all we have already accomplished.
Ask yourself:
Where have I already seen success in my life?
How can I continue building on that success?
What lessons have I learned from those successes?
What have I learned about myself from those areas?
Success is both a goal and a journey. When we reach certain milestones, that is an element of success. But we don’t stop there. We push higher and harder, striving for more and to bet better.
Tony Robbins says, “The path to success is to take massive, determined action.” But how do we find our path? What steps do we take to achieve true success?
We must be able to clearly answer several laser-specific questions:
What truly matters to me?
What are the things that set me on fire with passion?
What do I want to make of my life?
What lifestyle do I want to achieve?
Who do I want to be?
What do I want people to say about me after I die?
The answers to these questions must be ultra-specific. It’s not enough to say, What really matters to me is happiness. If you can’t see clearly, you won’t really know what that means, or what you’re doing or where you’re going. The same is true of your vision of success.
But before you can begin moving forward, you must assess where you’re at now. This is a time for honest evaluation, not rose-colored glasses. Where are you currently successful? Where do you need to grow? What are your weaknesses and strengths? Try bringing in a friend or colleague to act as a real and unbiased sounding board.
After that, it’s time to set some specific goals. These goals should be achievable and concrete, but still challenging. Your goals should also be measurable. Say you want to read more to be successful; set a goal of 50 books per year, not just “read more.”
If you don’t define success, someone else will define it for you. What mountain are you climbing? Is it the right one? Or are you going to reach the summit and see your mountain off in the distance?
Start on the right path today.
Success is something that you have to define for yourself, and no one can do it for you. Success could mean a sense of giving back to the world and making a difference. It could mean a sense of accomplishment and career progression.
It could mean being able to do the things you love. It could mean being able to provide the best possible upbringing for your children.
It’s entirely up to you.
A one-size-fits-all approach is impossible.
Let’s talk about the habits of successful people, and how successful people achieve great things by defining their own terms for success.
II. It’s never too late to write your success story
Many people think that they’re already too old to succeed.
Let’s consider some facts:
At age 23, Oprah had just been fired from her first broadcasting job.
At age 30, Jonah Peretti was teaching middle schoolers before founding his billion-dollar media companies, Buzzfeed and The Huffington Post.
At age 40, Stan Lee finally achieved success with Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and X-Men comics.
At age 50, Julia Child wrote her first cookbook.
At age 62, Kernel Sanders’ fried chicken business KFC finally succeeded.
At age 77, Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s president after spending 27 years in jail.
If we can learn anything from these people who succeed later in life, it’s this:
III. Success has no deadline.
In fact, according to the Forbes Top 100 list, on average, the people who found the world’s biggest companies don’t start until age 35. Out of 539 founders, the average age of starting their company was 40. Many of the world’s most successful people don’t even start pursuing their dreams until their 50s or 60s.
Success doesn’t mean by a certain age, at a certain time, or by a certain deadline. It isn’t about any other person’s measures or metrics except your own.
I’ve always wanted to write a book. And at age 40, I did.
But the book I published didn’t feel like “My Book.”
By age 50, I thought I was ready, but the timing wasn’t right.
Not until I turned 60 did I feel ready and able to write the book I truly wanted to write. Now more than ever, I feel ready to let “My Book” spill out of me and onto the page.
Success must match the rhythm of your soul.
IV . What does success mean to you?
Understanding success in your terms doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time, and many acts of courage, to uncover the deeper questions at the heart of your success journey.
You have to learn how to believe in yourself.
So the question becomes:
How can you discover the seeds waiting to blossom into ideas that drive the process of finding your purpose and meaning in your life?
I’m going to walk you through a short exercise to help get to the root of what success means to you. But first, let’s talk about what success doesn’t mean.
Success doesn’t mean copying what someone else is doing as a metric of your worth. If you use a comparison of achievements as a regular practice, you’re using an unhealthy and toxic practice.
When you think about the strengths of others and then compare them to your weaknesses, how do you measure up? Does it feel good?
As funny as it sounds, we’ve all done just that — compare our flaws to the strengths in other people.
Maybe you see someone online sharing news about a promotion, an engagement, a new car, or a lavish vacation.
We all know what happens next. We immediately look at ourselves to see how we size up. “Megan just bought a new house. Why don’t I have that at my age? What’s wrong with me?”
That’s not to say that comparison has no benefit. Mentors and role models can serve as great sources of inspiration. They demonstrate leadership qualities, and show the steps toward achieving big long term goals and proving that it can be done, at any age.
More often though, comparing yourself to others will leave you feeling dissatisfied and inadequate.
It causes you to lose sight of your strengths and accomplishments. Comparison gives a skewed version of reality that highlights your insecurities while exaggerating the success of other people.
Stop comparing your blooper reel to everyone else’s highlight reels.
Pic : How far You came forward in life so far...Think...!!
When you see someone who seems to have it all, you don’t see the full picture. People project their best achievements and rarely expose their painful failures. In other words, you see the highlights — a glamorous montage of achievements, distinctions, and talents.
At the same time, you can only see yourself from behind the scenes. Day-to-day life is not always exciting, for anyone. It’s filled with awkward moments, messy emotions, and yes — mistakes.
Comparison sets you up for failure from the start. It traps you in an ongoing cycle of insecurity in which you’ll never quite measure up.
The wrong kind of comparison puts attention on the assets of other people, rather than focusing on your strengths and goals. Getting caught up in other peoples’ achievements causes you to lose sight of your values.
You wind up chasing someone else’s dreams rather than pursuing your version of success.
V. What does success look like?
Since we know that comparison and status symbols are the worst way to define success, let’s talk about creating a better definition — tailored to your unique purpose in life.
The path to prosperity begins by finding out: what it means to you?
Take a moment. Close your eyes. Imagine your life the way you would like it to turn out.
Picture what it looks like when:
You are performing at your best.
You embody the characteristics you admire.
You have accomplished everything you wanted.
Now, take a piece of paper. Spend 10 minutes writing down what you see. Don’t worry about grammar or punctuation.
Simply list all the milestones you want to achieve in different areas of your life. List the principles, habits, career path, relationships, and possessions that define this version of you.
When you’re finished writing, ask yourself these questions:
Do the goals and attributes in your list align with your values?
Are these your goals, or are they based on the expectations of someone else?
Do some of the things on your list matter more than others?
Have you already accomplished some of the things on your list?
If not, what are you doing now to work toward these goals?
This process of assessing what you imagine against what you truly desire is powerful. It enables you to highlight goals that mean the most to you — and stop chasing the ones that don’t matter.
Pic : Foreground and Background for Success
You will notice that some items on your list stand out more than others. Think of these as your main dreams and aspirations. Success means moving towards these goals.
At the same time, other items will feel less important. When you examine why you want those things, you may realize… you don’t. Superficial goals and chasing someone else’s dream will lead you further away from success.
If this exercise makes you feel far behind where you think you should be, don’t think of it as a revelation of your failures. Instead, look at it as a new roadmap towards success, and an opportunity to start changing your life.
This way of approaching success provides a starting point that falls in line with your core values.
The next step is taking this clarified vision of success, and creating actionable, short-term goals that will create long-term success.
When you are deciding what success looks like for you, think about the daily steps you will have to take to achieve it.
Of course, it will be hard work. Every big achievement takes hard work. But the work itself has to feel rewarding. Picture what it will feel like working towards the goals you have in mind, and ask yourself:
Does it use your strengths, or demand skills you’re not suited for?
Do you enjoy doing it, or do you dread the daily effort?
Does it make you feel strong and competent, or ineffective and weak?
Can you see yourself doing the work long enough to get results?
When you paint a picture of success that demands work you hate doing, chances are you will give up long before you reach your goal.
So take your time, and conduct plenty of experiments before you commit to significant changes. Start small and see what if feels like.
VI. How do you define success ?
No Doubt, Money, Status, and Possessions are indicators of success. There are much more powerful measures to look at:
Truth: Do you speak and act from your soul?
Strength: How strong and resilient are you?
Focus: Are you pursuing what truly matters in your life?
Success develops from your willingness to try repeatedly for a breakthrough — to sweat all the way down until the salt of your soul spills out on the floor.
For example, before becoming a U.S. president, Abraham Lincoln…
…was defeated for the State Legislature. …failed in business. …was defeated for Speaker of the House. …was defeated for Congress. …was defeated for the U.S. Senate. …was defeated for nomination as vice president. …was defeated again for the U.S. Senate.
If we rest our definition of success on one or two achievements, there’s a good chance we’ll be disappointed.
VII. Success Stories
In the End ,
Being successful is the desire of all of us residing over this lovely planet. It does not matter whether the concerned person is a child, youth or the old aged, at each and every stage of our wide life span, it is our inbuilt desire to be successful and proceed forward consistently towards more massive success.
If in case, it does not happen, we use to get frustrated and finally get deeper inside the darkness of inferiority. Such a situation has been noticed among most of the people where regular and dedicated efforts have been ignored and merely the failures have been entertained.
There stand several such examples all over the world. Most of the iconic personalities have previously faced serious failures in their life’s struggles. Yet, they continued on their ways to success and finally achieved massive success in their fields of expertise. No caste, creed, religion or colors stopped them ever in their ways towards success.
The list of 10 best successful failures is mentioned with the help of the following bullet points:
1. Steve Jobs: Steve Jobs has been known as an iconic figure for the establishment of Apple like the biggest company. However, it is extremely shocking to know that the $2 billion company with over 4000 employees has been started with only two persons in a garage. It is also to be noticed that this great establisher has been dismissed and fired from the company from which he has started his career. Further, realizing his potential and capabilities, Steve Jobs proceeded further towards establishing this biggest company which is famously known as ‘Apple’.
2. Bill Gates: It was very much important for Bill gates to heed the lessons of failure in comparison to celebrating the joy of success. This great entrepreneur who has established Microsoft like the biggest software company is a dropout student from Harvard. Furthermore, he has also been known for his self-owned business figure known as Traf-O-Data which was one of the biggest failures in history. The entire investment of Bill Gates got vanished and unfortunately, even the education could also not get completed. But, the keen desire and the passion for the computer programming based stuff led him to establish such biggest software company with the brand name ‘Microsoft’
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3. Albert Einstein: Albert Einstein is a well-known scientist and extraordinary genius personality known by almost all of us all over the world due to his great inventions and contributions towards science. He quoted that success is a failure in progress and someone who has never failed cannot truly be a successful person. During childhood, he suffered from continuous failures. He was not even able to speak fluently till the age of nine years following which he has been expelled from the school. Furthermore, his admission to Zurich Polytechnic School was also not considered. But, leading to the ways of success consistently, he proved himself as a renowned gem in the ocean of science and technology and finally won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921.
4. Abraham Lincoln: This great personality who has also been the ex-president of the USA has suffered regularly from massive failures year after the year. Lincoln failed in his business in the year 1831 and after which in the year 1836, he got a major nervous breakdown. Struggling consistently for years, he again failed in 1856 during US presidential elections. Fighting and struggling consistently, he elected as the sixteenth President of the USA in 1861 and went on leading towards his way of life.
5. J.K.Rowling : J.K.Rowling has been known as the famous author of the most selling book ‘Harry Potter’ who has clearly stated about her failures during a speech ceremony commenced at Harvard. She stated about her unsuccessful marriage life with an entire life in front of live lonely with a jobless situation. Such a difficult situation without a life partner and a job to survive forced her to start a new life as a dynamic author. Her creativity finally led her to the zenith of success.
6. Michael Jordan: Michael Jordan is one of the most renowned basketball players in sports world history. He was a short-height boy early in childhood due to which he often uses to get rejected during the selection processes. After being grown up and started playing like a basketball player, he even failed to hit over nine thousand shots and ultimately lost over three hundred games for twenty-six times. He got frustrated a lot but his dedication and consistency paved his way towards success.
7. Walt Disney: Walt Disney has been known as one of the famous cartoonist and creator of famous cartoon creatures such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, etc to name a few. He even failed several times in his life. His unsuccessful attempt to join armed forces finally forced him to drop out of the schools and leave his further studies. His initiative Laugh-O-Gram Studios even went bankrupt and finally, after joining a newspaper agency named Missouri Newspaper, he was fired because of not being creative enough as per the expectations. When he finally succeeded.... and Rest is History....!!
8. Vincent Van Gogh: This famous personality has been known as one of the greatest painter and artist along with a world-renowned icon in world history. However, due to continuous failures and misfortunes such as mental illness and improper bonding in the relationships forced him to commit suicide at an early age of merely 37 years. During the entire life span, this person sold only a single painting which revolutionized him in the world of arts and paintings which is alive to date.
9. Stephen King: This name is famous as the most renowned writer all over the world. However, he met several misfortunes and failures during his life span. His childhood was spent under the dark capture of poverty with added misfortunes of getting in under the cover of drugs and alcohol as well. But, finally, he kept on concentrating on his writing based hobby and professionalized it by developing several new writing styles along with new copyrighting mechanisms as well.
10. Steven Spielberg: This great filmmaker who has won countless records and prizes for his contribution towards best film making has also suffered from several failures in his life. He was not able to get higher examination grades in the schools during the childhood following which he has been suspended three times from the University of Southern California. Following his passion and dedication, he went on creating great movies and finally won three Oscar awards and made a sum total of fifty-one great movies.
These below Videos may give some Insights on Journey of Success ...!!
10 Habits Of All Successful People!
2. 15 RULES of SUCCESS by Alux
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOlM30CoBw8
Conclusion
Sometimes, It looks like, Whether Failure is Essential Component of Success ...Success is Independent of religious ethics and not at all dependent on any specific religions including Hindu, Muslim, Christianity or Any Other Religious Group etc to name a few.
Success is the result of key determination and concentration while moving ahead in the path of Hard Work . The story of all the ten world-renowned personalities is enough to build an everlasting potential towards reaching the goal of success.
MM Rao
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Sources :
https://yourstory.com/mystory/top-10-inspirational-success-stories/amp
https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+success&safe=strict&rlz=1C1CHBF_enIN913IN913&sxsrf=ALeKk03UylF44LGjLJ09BWE1J2NC0INe1Q:1603859125157&source=lnms&tbm