Wednesday 19 July 2017

How to Make a Success of Your Life



How to Make a Success of Your Life


Developing a vision for your life

It’s important to have a clear vision of where you want to be in life. If you know exactly what you want to achieve and where you want to end up, it becomes easier to make decisions that will get you there. It takes away a lot of the indecision and confusion about how you should be filling your time if you know what the results are that you want to see.

If you want to be a social worker, for example, you focus on this vision clearly and make choices that will bring you closer and closer to this dream. You will rather choose to spend your extra earnings on doing a counseling course than spend it on a new DVD player, because the one gets you closer to your dream. If you didn’t have a clear vision of where you wanted to be, you wouldn’t be able to measure what you’re doing to get there.

You also need to reinforce this vision very often. The more often you remember what you want and remind yourself what you’re going for, the less you’ll be distracted by things that don’t matter as much. Put up a reminder of your vision for your life somewhere visible in your home. Put it as a background image or screensaver on your PC, phone or tablet. Talk about your dream often or even start a blog about it. Everything you do to make your vision more real and to keep it alive will help you to get there eventually.

Be brave enough to claim your dreams. Don’t be afraid to say where you’re going with your life. The more you talk about it and show that you’re proud and confident of what you’re working towards, the more you might be able to get others to believe in you and even support you along the way.

A good tool that many people use to remind themselves of their goals is by making a vision board or writing a list of the things they really want. On your vision board you could put pictures of the life you want to live. Make it clear, vibrant and happy. Fill it with positive, inspiring messages. No one will believe in your dream unless you believe in it yourself first, so be very clear about what you want for your life and start owning that dream.

Having a clear vision for your relationships, work, hobbies, interests or even the things you want to own or accomplish is a powerful first step in living the life of your dreams and unlocking your true potential.

What is your ultimate potential?

The truth is that you have limitless potential to make your life amazing. When you limit your goals and vision because you think it’ll be too hard to get there, you’re feeding yourself the message that you’re not capable of doing the amazing things you want to do.

Those people who have the greatest success first needed to believe in what they have to offer the world. You need to trust that your unique contribution is worthwhile. Even if there are a thousand other bakers in your city, you need to know that if your passion is to bake, you can make a success of it. There is always room for another person with passion and drive in the world. You might just have to find a new, unique way to do what you want to do.

Your ultimate potential, just like with everyone else, is limitless. But you do need to remember that most of the time, things will not work out exactly the way that you want, and you might not be able to reach your dreams in exactly the way you thought you would.

For example, when she was a child, Hillary Clinton initially wanted to become an astronaut and sent a letter to NASA, but she was told at the time that they would not accept women into their space program. She realized that she had incredible potential for greatness, but she encountered a roadblock to her dream. Instead of simply giving up on reaching success, she refocused her energy into politics and eventually became the Secretary of State of the United States, one of the most senior governmental positions. Finding new ways to use the potential that you have when you encounter certain dead ends can lead you to discover dreams that you never even considered before.

Be willing to recognize your talents and to nurture your dreams, but don’t be held down by them. If you find a new way of expanding yourself and demonstrating your talents, go in that direction. Move in the direction of opportunity and growth, and you can reach your full potential in life.

What is your true measure of success?

Lots of people think that being successful means being extremely rich, having a trophy husband or wife, and being in a position of great power over other people. While this might give some people a feeling of authentic success, it’s not the final vision of a truly satisfying life for all of us. Sometimes, having all of these things might make you seem successful in the eyes of others, but it could actually mean that you are squandering your potential if you choose to simply live your life in order to be admired by other people or to fulfil this simplistic definition of success.

We definitely need to have enough money to do the things we need to do in order to be successful. We definitely need to have power over our lives. But more money and power does not necessarily mean more success.

You can see this in the example mentioned above of J.K. Rowling, who gave away a large portion of her wealth to charity and chose to expand beyond the book series that made her rich so that she could follow her creative passion.

You can also see this with someone like Mark Shuttleworth, the billionaire South African businessman, who stepped down as CEO of his company, instead spending a lot of his time pursuing his passion for spaceflight and developing his nonprofit organization which funds social innovation, education and free and open source software projects.

Many of these people know that the money and power alone won’t equal the feeling of real success. It can help you to do the things you want, but you can still pursue the things you want without needing more and more money and power.

Even if you feel that success means having the newest car, the most popular song or the most attractive partner, all of these things will fade. There will be newer models of cars, a more popular song and a more attractive person sooner than you know. If you only measure success on superficial things, it will always be ephemeral and you’ll never be satisfied.

Real success means achieving something that has real meaning and significance to you, and living a life that gives you joy and fulfilment every day. It means doing a job that you really love doing, where you contribute in a way that makes you feel valued. It means working with people in a way that is mutually beneficial. It means having strong, genuine relationships with others. It means feeling satisfied at the end of the day, not feeling like your energy is being wasted.

When you are reaching your full potential, you are finding new ways to do the things that really make you feel this way. This means using your talents in order to achieve goals that reflect the ideas listed above. You should be able to know that every day you’ve done something challenging, but you’ve done your best and you’ve grown.

Real success is giving your heart and soul to work that makes your own life and the lives of others better.

You don’t need to be the best at something, the leader of something or the wealthiest person around to feel this level of real success. If you always measure your level of success by these things, you might be missing out on really living the life of your dreams because you are living the life that others want you to live. If you want to really reach your full potential you need to begin measuring your success on things that you really want, not what the characters on television, your parents or anyone else says you should want to be or have. Being authentic allows you to truly be fulfilled in life.

The most successful people say that they are self-motivated. This means that they don’t look at what other people want from them, but they develop their own goals and have real, authentic reasons for pursuing these goals.

If you are simply applying for a job to impress someone else, you will never truly love that job or feel like an authentic success. If you are only doing something because it’s seen as a respectable thing to do, you won’t feel satisfied at the end of the day.

Think of all the things that really make you feel happy and that you really want to accomplish one day, no matter what other people think. Use these things to frame the vision for your life.

Your past doesn’t define you

While it’s definitely easier for some people to get certain jobs and do certain impressive things with their lives because they were raised with privileges, this does not mean that these people are successful. In fact, lots of people doing things that you might find really respectable, like businesspeople, doctors, lawyers or politicians, are deeply dissatisfied with their lives and wish that they could be doing something else. Despite their advantages in life and the fact that they have a lot of money, power and prestige, they don’t really feel successful and they are not living up to their full potential.

Many of the people who achieve the greatest successes, and who really feel fulfilled and satisfied with their lives, are those who have come from the most challenging circumstances or have faced the most adversity. These people know what they’re working for and why they want to achieve what they are achieving in life. These are also the people who often use their influence in order to make the world better for people who come from similar disadvantaged backgrounds.

Oprah Winfrey is the prime example of overcoming adversity and using her background to really change the world. She was born to a single teenage mother in rural Mississippi. Her family was very poor. She was raped and sexually abused throughout her childhood, starting at age nine, and became pregnant at age 14, eventually losing her child in infancy.

However, she worked and studied exceptionally hard, eventually earning her own talk show which ran for 25 years, and she is currently North America’s only black billionaire.

Oprah did what she really loved to do, and found incredible success doing it.

The money, power and influence weren’t enough for her, and she extended her reach to make the world a better place through many philanthropic works, including building a leadership academy for girls in South Africa. She also still takes chances and has greater goals, realizing that she still has the potential for greater things.

Oprah is just one of many examples of people who overcame the struggles of their pasts to truly make their lives a success. Your past does not define what your life can become, and it doesn’t have to hold you back. No matter what the circumstances of your life are right now, people who were in similar circumstances achieved great successes. You can too.

Find a story of someone who faced the same struggles that you are facing and still went on to live the life of their dreams. Use this story to motivate you to go for what you want in life. Don’t allow your personal history to weigh you down from reaching what your life could be.

Anything really is possible for you

The biggest problem is that people limit themselves in their thinking. They imagine that all the excuses they can list for why they are not successful yet, or the obstacles they are facing that make it difficult for them to change, are good enough reasons to stay exactly where they are. They don’t allow themselves to see that they are capable of so much more.

Don’t be one of the people who is constantly held back by their fear or by the idea that they simply don’t have what it takes to succeed. You have what it takes, and you can exceed your wildest dreams if you simply follow the steps of success which many others have followed to get them where they are today.

You are not any different from anyone else. If you do all of the things that will take you towards your dream, eventually you will get there. Maybe your dream will change a bit along the way, but it will still be worth fighting for a life that you truly want to live and using your talents and passions to make your life extraordinary. 

In the next section I’ll explore many of the common strategies which people follow in order to unlock their potential. It won’t be easy to get there, but it will be worth it.

Click on the next blog post to continue reading.