If you are reading this article, then it is reasonable to assume that you are striving for success. We broadly define success is the continual achievement of successive goals toward major positive life-changing accomplishments. In your drive for success, you may envision a life of abundance, happiness, and triumph. Maybe you are looking for work success in the form of a specific achievement, raise, or promotion. Or, perhaps you are pursuing influence, reverence, victory, and notoriety. Or, maybe you are searching for simpler forms of success, the likes of which may come in the form of a great family life, rock-solid integrity, wisdom, or inner peace. Regardless of the form, your goal is to succeed, to do well, to win, to conquer, or simply to be on top. This article was written to EMPOWER you with strategies for achieving any form of success. While some of the strategies reflect the action that must be taken, many of them focus more on developing a mindset that needed to attract any form of success in your life.
1. Dream of Success!
The first step to any form of success is to dream about it. Your imagination is the mother of all great ideas. In sequence, all successes in life begin as great ideas. Drs. Sophia Miranda and Soye Zaid-Muhammad had written an entire article on dreaming toward success. The message in that article was simple: Do not be afraid to dream. Keep dreaming, for your dreams are a factory of ideas. Your dreams allow you to visualize what is possible. Your dreams are supernatural, and will allow you to think beyond your limitations. Finally, your dreams are the forecast for sunny days ahead. So, your first step toward success is to dream and dream big.
2. Define your Success!
Once you have a vision of success from your dreams, you have to define it with specificity. As we mentioned above, success is broadly defined as the continual achievement of successive goals toward major positive life-changing accomplishments. To specifically define your version of success, you have to ask very specific questions to bring success into focus. You can explore questions like the following:
- What are the top three things that you want to achieve above all other things?
- What is the nature of your success?
- What will your success look like?
- How will you know that you have obtained your success?
- What will it take to get to the point where you have succeeded?
- What tools, strategies, supports, and steps do you need to achieve your success?
Once you have defined your success, you are reading to bring it into focus with a specific plan and with goals.
3. Set Goals for Your Success!
Goal setting toward success is a delicate operation. It requires more than just lightweight goals that inch toward success. That rate of progress almost never reaches the finish line. Instead, you must set quality game-changing goals to push aggressively toward success. To this end, goal setting is so critical to personal and professional development that it has been studied extensively. For example, American Psychologist, Edwin Locke, is a leading pioneer in Goal Setting Theory, which generally explores the effects of setting quality goals on successful performance. Locke generally found that individuals who set clear, specific, and difficult goals performed better than those who set general, ambiguous, and easy goals. Locke proposed five basic principles of goal-setting:
- Clarity: A clear, measurable goal is more achievable than one that is poorly defined. In other words, it is important to be specific. The most effective goals have a specific timeline for completion.
- Challenge: Every goal must have a reasonable level of difficulty in order to motivate you toward the goal.
- Commitment: It is important to be deliberate and intentional toward meeting goals. Having an accountability partner would help with this.
- Feedback: What gets measured gets done. So, it is important to track progress and success toward goals. As you track goals, you can make adjustments in effort, timelines, and strategies to ensure success down the line.
- Goal Complexity: It is important to set goals that are reasonably tough and complex, but attainable. As mentioned above, the goal should be complex enough to be a game-changing goal. For example, if you want more education, don’t just read a book, set a goal to complete a course. Just be sure to allow for enough time to overcome the learning curve involved in completing the task.
So, if you truly want to succeed, set high quality, no-nonsense, challenging, and game-changing goals, one after another.
4. Visualize Your Success!
To realize success you have to see it first. This goes beyond eyesight. Instead, it requires mindsight. This involves a 2-step process. First, you can visualize your success through your continuous thoughts and imagination. With guided imagery, you can close your eyes and picture all of the possible successful outcomes. Second, it is worthwhile to take what you have visualized and match it with external images. For example, if you are looking for a particular type of home, create a vision board with multiple photographs of multiple variations of your dream home. If you want to pass a test, create a test print out score sheet with your name on it and with the passing grade. Once you see your success, you are more likely to believe it, which will cause you to move toward it.
5. Prepare for Your Success!
If there was ever a single factor that could guarantee success, it would be preparation. Preparation is one of the biggest keys to success. It is what separates the winners from losers, challengers from champions, and the successful from the unsuccessful. Preparation involves the important processes of change and improvement that begins with learning, studying, training, and practicing. Here is a tip to remember: Good preparation will give you the knowledge and skills needed to accomplish your success goals. However, great preparation will completely transform you into a person who is capable of achieving unimaginable success.
6. Work Your Way Toward Success!
Once you are adequately prepared to reach your goals, you have to work toward those goals. This involves applying what you have learned as you work toward your goals in real-time. This also involves learning by doing. For example, you can read hundreds of books and view several computerized models that would help you to understand how to fly an aircraft. You may even log thousands of hours in a flight simulator. However, the only way to become a pilot is to get into an actual aircraft and fly that aircraft, under the supervision of a pilot. until you become good at it. Then after that, keep flying to keep your skills up. In business, you can have 3 business degrees with years of experience at a corporation. However, you will never become an entrepreneur until you step out of your comfort zone, put together a business model, create a website, open a shop, market the service or products, and work the business until it becomes a success. Simply put, great ideas will not work unless you work them.
7. Will your way to success
Where there is a will, there is a way. These words ring especially true in terms of attracting success. It is healthy to expect and to believe that you will achieve success. However, you also have to develop the will to act on the things that you want to achieve. If we had to describe the power of your will, we could state the following:
- Your will is an emotional force that moves against life’s most difficult circumstances.
- Your will is the determination to act when action is needed, to stand up when fortitude needed, and to motivate when inspiration is needed.
- Your will resides between your faith and your action, and often mediates between the two.
- Your will appears to be the mortal enemy of fear. And, in fact, fear itself fears your will.
- Your will to act is so powerful, that it will not only enable you to succeed, it will give you the power to achieve the impossible.
- Your will is a magnet for your success.
Therein, while fear, reluctance, hesitation, and procrastination repels success, your will attracts it. So from now on, whenever a cynic or skeptic asks you how you plan to accomplish a near-impossible goal, respond with these five words: THE WILL TO DO IT!
8. Surround Yourself With Success.
Another great way to attract success is to surround yourself with people that are successful. For example, if you want to be a successful pastry chef, then you can go to school, learn from the most accomplished pastry chefs, and even develop a mentoring relationship with one of them. It is important to understand that success leaves clues; or, more accurately, successful individuals leave clues. So, even you happen to be from a tiny town with very few successful people, you can still do the following to surround yourself with success:
- Read books on your craft to learn how others mastered it.
- Listen to podcasts by successful people in your chosen field.
- Watch online videos by people who have achieved success
- Read and subscribe to the blogs of people who have had extraordinary success.
- Send out Emails to successful people and ask them questions that will help you to succeed (Successful people love this).
- Sign up for courses to learn skills that will guarantee your success.
- Travel to places and events, such as conferences, that will give you the opportunity to network with successful individuals.
There is one more tip to offer here. Avoid surrounding yourself with negative, downtrodden, and unsuccessful people. They are like quicksand and will pull you into the gutter immediately after contact. If you find that you are the smartest, most talented, most vibrant and most successful person in your group, then find another group. Love them from a distance, but move on to people who can help you to grow and thrive. Also, remember this mantra: If you are surrounded by nine extraordinarily successful people, you are likely to become the tenth. So, surround yourself with success.
9. Project Your Success!
As you begin to learn, grow, and thrive on the inside, it is important to project your success on the outside. People often describe this as faking it until you make it, but it is much more profound than that. Your success begins on the inside with your faith in a higher power, your belief that you can achieve, your newly acquired knowledge, and your will to act. Therefore, it should not at all be considered a farce to project the confidence, skills, appearance, and mindset of a successful individual. Here are some tips toward projecting success:
- Act the part by modeling your behavior after the behaviors of the most successful people around you.
- Walk the walk by practicing the philosophy of successful people.
- Exude confidence by trusting yourself in difficult circumstances.
- Align yourself mostly with circumstances, events, activities, and people that are associated with success.
The main point is this: The more you project success out into the world, the more you will attract it. In this regard, successful people will be drawn to you; new paid opportunities will be offered to you; highly skilled mentors and masters will show up to further hone your talent and skills; your life will change for the better; and ultimately, you will attract more success.
10. Maintain Your Success!
Once you have obtained success, you must maintain it. This can be done by acting on new ideas, working on new projects, setting new goals, partnering with new minds, and venturing into new opportunities. It is also important to invest the resources that were obtained in previous waves of success into future success ventures. As you do this, not only will you maintain your current success, you will also inevitably attract more success.
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