3 Practical Secrets of Success (That Nobody Is Talking About!)

My father was a fighter of the finest kind. From the struggles of a rural bred youth finding his feet in the hyper anglicized urban India to the pitched battle that were the cut-throat competitive examinations that get people into coveted bureaucratic positions in this country to the ultimate war that was waged against death and cancer, there were few challenges my father had not faced. He aced most of them, with panache and style. And even when he lost, he lost like a true hero, handing over lessons that have steered us through the toughest of times in our lives.

There was a wealth of wisdom he bequeathed to us in the relatively short period that life allowed him with us. It was wisdom hard-earned, forged in the toughest and rawest of the experiences. It wasn’t wisdom learned from the books, even though books had played a major role in earning it. It was a wisdom that can steer me through the toughest of times and answer questions that nobody else seems to understand.

While it would be impossible to cover the length and breadth of the said wisdom in a single article (I’d probably write a book someday), here are three ideas that are radical, practical, and about as real as you can get when it comes to the idea of success in a success-obsessed world.

1. Success = Authenticity + Individuality + Confidence

There was a story my father used to narrate to us a lot. It was a story about his early days in the city when he was still a bright but rural bred youth who had studied in Hindi medium schools all his life and was yet to catch up with the Anglophile bandwagon in the country.

The story was about a debate competition, a bilingual one thank God, where most participants were city slickers (my words, not his) who came in armed with crisp suits, crisper English, and truckloads of disdain for everyone not ‘English’ enough.

My father, with his Hindi background and less than fashionable clothes, was a soft target of their ridicule. Or could have been, if he had allowed it. Instead, he chose to get on that stage, armed with nothing more than an impromptu speech in Hindi and oodles of confidence. His speech in fluent Hindi was flamboyant and animated and raw in a way most participants in the competition would not dare imagine in their wildest of sophisticated fantasies, in a way nobody had thought was possible to pull it off in that competition.

My father did it. Because he did not let anybody tell him whether or not he could.

He did not win that competition, because this is life, not a movie. But he came a close third, which was a feat beyond anybody’s imagination.

The moral of the story was straightforward. Success is a construct as much as the ingredients of the said success. You can whip up your wild recipe, based on nothing more than your raw authenticity and strengths. But, first, you need to believe in yourself and your ability to make it.

Confidence is a con that you pull on the rest of the world as much as yourself. There is no reason, or logic, or explanation behind it. It’s a trick where you learn to trick yourself into believing in something that may be unimaginable, even outrageous. But, so long as you can muster that confidence, pull off that con without flinching, without giving in to inevitable doubts of others as well as your own, you can make it. Because originality trumps fitting in if only you can back it with confidence.

2. To Tame The Horses, You Have To Learn To Fall

There is an Urdu couplet my father loved.

Girte Hain Shahsawaar Hi Maidaan-e-Jung Me

Wo Tifl Kya Girein Ki Jo Ghutno Ke bal Chalein

Only the ones who dare to ride a horse on the battlefield risk a fall

Not those who choose to crawl the ground

Only if you ride a horse, can you fall. Falling is a symbol—a symbol that you dared to mount that horse in the first place. It is not an embarrassment or a sign of your incompetence or lack of talent. It is merely a sign that you tried. And maybe you are good enough. Yet.

The subtle caveat is that you need to keep climbing back, no matter how many times you fall. The moment you give up, the moment you choose to start crawling instead of mounting the damn horse, is the moment you are done, the moment where you finally and decisively become not good enough.

I hope you would excuse the metaphor overload, but this was perhaps my father’s way to make sure a complex lesson in resilience was imprinted in my young mind with no risk of being forgotten. Even as grown-ups, it perhaps makes sense for us to embrace this analogy and make a game out of our failures.

You can count the horses, you can count the falls, and ultimately, at some point in time, you will start counting the battles you have conquered. Falling is a prerequisite, as is failing. Because a probability of failure ensures a parallel probability of success. And if you are not risking failure, you are not chancing success either.

3. Nothing Succeeds Like Success

It was one of the harder to process lessons that started making sense much, much later in life to me. It was a phrase my father was fond of repeating—nothing succeeds like success. If you were to become a top, powerful bureaucrat in the country, he said, you can climb up on any stage and shake a leg, and everyone around is going to praise you profusely for the performance. The praise in this case is not an outcome of the performance, but of the stature that you have earned, even though in a completely different capacity.

Crude as it may sound, it was one of the finest lessons that drive the idea of successful branding. You create a name, a brand, a seal of excellence in one domain, and then you can keep cashing it in as many domains as possible. You have to be good at one thing. Everything else follows.

Success breeds success. It is a harsh truth that nobody, not even in the big wide world of self-help and success lessons, really wants to talk about. Not in such direct, somewhat crude terms. But it is also a truth that we must all accept to retain our sanity and courage while we fight through the tough times. Because the automatic flipside of this statement is that nothing fails like failure. And while it would be reductive to say failure breeds failure, at least in terms of perceptions and opinions, one has to accept that when you fail, everything about you will get questioned—your decisions, your talents, your choices, your entire existence is pushed under the shadow of your failure.

It is not fair, but it is a fact. And the sooner we accept it, accept that the world will always remain obsessed with success and will never spare failures, the sooner we get over it and start moving beyond. It is the kind of acceptance that is rooted in graceful stoicism of how this world works and a resilient preparedness to deal with it. Ultimately, it is nothing more than a reminder of the subjectivity of perceptions about both success and failures.

Times change, so do opinions. It doesn’t matter what they think of you. All that matters is what you think of yourself. Because that is where the secret ingredient of your success remains hidden. The secret ingredient is called confidence. At least my father believed so. And he was usually right.