Success Tips

Grit

A number of successful people attribute their success to their staying power ability to remain on task. To continue to work toward your goal, long after it has become boring. Boredom brings disillusionment and a wish to abandon the goal for another bright and shiny (and more easily obtainable) goal.

You've heard the expression; wash, rinse repeat. Abandoning goals can fall into that category.

There is no substitute for the grind. Before you start know the grind is on the road pushing back on you from reaching your goal. Know that new bright and shiny goals will tempt you away from your work with the promise of "easier" attainability.

So what do you do? When you are considering what goal to pursue, choose a worthwhile goal worthy of your time and effort, even when the work gets boring and it's a grind to continue. If the goal is not worth that effort, choose a goal that is. Asking yourself, what one goal could I set that would have the greatest positive impact on my life, is a good place to start.

Other goals will always tempt you away from your current goal, you can say, yeah, I'll get to that, right after I reach this goal.

It's not fun. That's why there are more unsuccessful people than successful. You'll probably think of three or four goals more worthy of your time than grinding away for this goal right now.

Calm you're "Fear Of Missing Out" anxiety of not pursuing new goals by writing those goals down. Know the goals are not lost, just waiting for their turn. Hopefully, that will keep you sustained to stay on task.

Enjoy the work. It's the unpublished writer who continues to write and submit work, the actor who continues to audition at open calls and study their craft, the inventor, after hundreds of failed prototypes continues onto the next prototype.

Surviving the grind is a mindset. You need to find satisfaction in the work, in the process. Enjoy the journey so much that you are not always focused on the results. Let's go back and look at our writer. If his goal is to be a published author but doesn't actually enjoy writing. Writing is just a means to an end. Chances are he will not survive the grind. Or lose momentum once the goal of being published is achieved. Not enjoying the work is when you look for a way out, a quick fix. There are plenty of snake oil salespeople, ready to take your hard-earned cash and sell a scheme of a shortcut to success.

Chose Your Friends Not Your Family

My daddy used to tell me you can choose your friends but you can't choose your family. This was usually after a cousin or relative slighted me in some way. What he didn't tell me was to choose my friends carefully.

If you want to be a football player, hang out with football players, you want to be a musician hang out with musicians. If you want to be a millionaire, you guessed it, hang out with millionaires.

You can use this association with most vocations or goals. Why does it work?

Associations rub off on you. The old saying birds of a feather, thing. There is a mindset among a group that affects behaviors and attitudes. For instance, writers talk about writing, plots, characters, fiction, non-fiction, submissions, editors, failures, successes, royalty payments, non-payments, how long it took to get paid, rights, copyrights, exclusive rights, non-exclusive rights, prints, eBooks, magazines, on-line magazines, blogs, etc. So if you're associating with writers, when they're talking about writing, this is the group mindset that will be nudging your mindset in the direction of a writer.

So who are you hanging out with?

Trust but Verify

I like President Ronald Regan's popularizing the Russian proverb "Trust but Verify." To this, I add don't be anyone's disciple. Listen I like motivational speakers and super successful people as much as the next person. If I can learn from them that's great. They have valuable lessons to teach and the good lessons, that pass the smell test, ought to be incorporated into your own thinking. The smell test, that's the verify part. What may be true for one person may not be true for you. If it doesn't fit, don't hammer a square peg into a round hole. Which means thinking for yourself at all times. Weight and judge what you are told and taught, and reject it, even if that person is Elon Musk or Tony Robbins.

Work Hard & Don’t Be Afraid To Fail

Some people are so afraid of failure they refuse to try to succeed. You can’t fail if you never tried to succeed. And you can always placate yourself into believing if you did try, you’d succeed. But these dreams of success rarely have one imagine the hard work and failures one will encounter before succeeding. Do you know how many successful people failed at something important in their life? All of them. The difference is they didn’t let failure stop them. Some used failure as rocket fuel to work harder.

If you can learn from your failures, then it’s not a failure but a lesson. You may need to zig instead of zag, or maybe do a little zig, zag, then zoo. Make it a lesson learned.