269 Results

Success is a choice

Search

You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want. – Zig Ziglar

Self-interest is the act of focusing on one’s needs or interests. Enlightened self-interest involves serving the needs and interests of others while at the same time serving one’s needs. At the root cause of most wars, family rifts, divorces, conflicts, misunderstandings, and miscommunication is asking someone to act against their self-interest. The greed, avarice and selfishness often associated with the corporate (dog eat dog) world and capitalism are a result of unenlightened self-interest. Enlightened Self-interest can be expressed in various ways, such as doing well by doing good, paying it forward, not-for-profit organization, mentorship, coaching, and leadership, among others. American author Zig Ziglar once said “You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.

People will do something—including changing their behavior—only if it can be demonstrated that doing so is in their own best interests as defined by their own values.

In What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful!, executive coach Marshall Goldsmith identifies fundamental problems that often come with success–and offers ways to attack these problems. He outlines twenty habits commonly found in the corporate environment and provides a systematic approach to helping you achieve a positive change in behaviour.

The difference between success that happens because of our behavior and the success that comes in spite of our behavior

When everything is said and done, everyone dies. Our time here on earth is limited, as most of us find out very late. We live our lives like we would get as old as Methuselah; we delay living our lives to the utmost by living in someday isle and we lead an autopilot life in quiet desperation tiptoeing towards our grave. We don’t make waves because we fear the ripple effects and what other people would say or feel. But the reality of life is that we only have this one shot to make an impact and lead a life of adventure and purpose. Every action we take in life has consequences; our input determines our output, cause and effect, reap and sow.

How you live your life daily, through your choices and priorities, has long-lasting consequences on how your life will eventually turn out. At least in advanced economies, the average human life expectancy is around 80 years old. For an 80-year life, one-third of that will be spent sleeping, and another will be used for work, commuting and preparing to work. If we put this in perspective, we have less than 30 years to live a life of consequence. The more one realizes they don’t have much time, the more it becomes crucial to re-order priorities and things that would matter.

“What is success? To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate the beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch Or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?

Anytime I hear someone say I don’t have time for that or I am too busy, they are advertising their priorities. If you don’t have time to read or exercise, it is a testament that those activities are not pain points for you. Most of the time, we are not as busy as we think. We live in an age where busyness is a badge of honour. Henry David Thoreau once said, “It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?

In High-Performance Habits: How Extraordinary People Become That Way, high-performance coach Brendon Burchard (The Motivation Manifesto) shares the six deliberate habits of high-performing individuals and teams.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do.Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.—Aristotle

I used to want to change people through insights, advice-giving, lessons learned, and strategies garnered. But I realized that If I wanted to change anyone, the only person I needed to change was myself. Most of us don’t like being told what to do. We want to buy but we don’t want to be sold to. As author John C. Maxwell puts it “People change when they … Hurt enough that they have to, Learn enough that they want to, and Receive enough that they are able to.” Sometimes the only way we change is when we have hit rock bottom and change is not something we wish for but we have to swim out of the hole or we sink. It is a constant battle to stop myself from giving unsolicited advice. I try to read as much as possible, and the more I know, the more I realize that I still have a lot of work to do.

People change when they hurt enough that they have to change. People change when they learn enough that they want to change. People change when they receive enough that they are able to change.  – John C. Maxwell

“Wherever you see a successful person or business, someone once made a courageous decision.”-Peter Drucker

Decision (n.) mid-15c., “act of deciding,” from Old French décision (14c.), from Latin decisionem (nominative decisio) “a decision, settlement, agreement,” noun of action from past-participle stem of decidere “to decide, determine,” literally “to cut off,” from de “off” (see de-) + caedere “to cut” (from PIE root *kae-id- “to strike”). Deciding means to cut off from other options. It is non-negotiable; you have decided where and what you want to do with your life. Making life-changing decisions, especially those not conforming to societal preconceived values, can be tricky. A resolution is a firm decision to do or not to do something. When most of us make New Year’s resolutions, we make a wish that lasts for 4-8 weeks. As the going gets tough, as they would ultimately do, we go back to our old ways.

A resolution is a firm decision to do or not to do something.

The word intention is derived from the  Middle English entenciounintention, from Old French entencion, from Latin intentiō, intentiōnem. Intention (n.) late 14c., entencioun, “purpose, design, aim or object; will, wish, desire, that which is intended,” from Old French entencion “intent, purpose, aspiration; will; thought” (12c.), from Latin intentionem (nominative intentio) “a stretching out, straining, exertion, effort; attention,” noun of action from intendere “to turn one’s attention,” literally “to stretch out”. Also in Middle English “emotion, feelings; heart, mind, mental faculties, understanding.”

We all have a preferred choice of drug that makes us feel good and get the dopamine rush that we often desire. Our drug may be mindless, scrolling our social media feed, exercising, TV bingeing, pornography, sex, gambling, compulsive spending, etc. We all have our addictions, compulsions, obsessions and drugs; the key is to choose our obsessions wisely and use them in moderation. As Samuel Jackson once said, “The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.” We live in a world where it is easy to access our choice of drugs, from online pornography to online betting platforms to sex escort sites; getting a dose of our preferred drug is just a click away. With much power comes great responsibility. Choose your drugs wisely and use them in moderation.

“Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.”― Ralph Waldo Emerson

Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. – Jim Rohn

One of the significant hallmarks of the highly successful in any profession, sport, field or sector is their ability to go the extra mile. They understand what it takes to go to the next level, from good to great. First, you must stay consistent with the process and then get intense with the relentless pursuit of your goals and objectives. As the American author and motivational speaker often said: “Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. It is the accumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgments that leads us to either fortune or failure. Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. We do not fail overnight. Failure is the inevitable result of an accumulation of poor thinking and poor choices.” Success is never an accident, and failure doesn’t just happen overnight; both occur due to our efforts day in and day out. Your input determines your output to get what you have never gotten; you’ve got to do what you have never done.

We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.’ – Archilochus

We will all have moments in life where we come to a new realization, a paradigm shift, where we’ve had enough, and we take the steering wheel of our life. Author Jim Rohn refers to it as the day that turns your life around; the father of American psychology, William James, calls it mental rearrangement; German Sociologist Max Weber coined the term metanoia to capture a massive change in a person’s outlook. Other names for this phenomenon include inflection points, crossroads, U-turns, crises, pivots, monster curveballs, ampersands, life quakes etc. These moments come in different shapes, sizes and forms. These life-changing moments are usually an opportunity for a rebirth, as the character of George Clooney in the movie “Up in the Air” remarked.

In his poem, The Road Not Taken, American poet. Robert Frost wrote “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference.” Our natural human tendency is homeostasis, our inclination to look for the path of least resistance, the easy route, the shortcuts, and go through the road often travelled. As Frost noted in his poem, taking the road less travelled made all the difference. The road less travelled is the third door, it is not obvious to most of us as it takes the relentless pursuit of a course bigger than us, it requires seeing the big picture and staying committed to our priorities and goals. To achieve anything worthwhile in life, courage is an essential component of getting great things done. If you do what everybody is doing, you will ultimately get the same result they are getting.

I recently joined a scabble club with many experienced and seasoned players. A typical game with these players involves 3-4 bingos per game. In Scrabble, bingo is a game wherein a player utilizes all seven tiles on the board in a single turn. These players understand their game, which is that “Scrabble is a numbers game and not a vocabulary game.” It is not the best speller or who knows the most vocabulary words that win, but the person who strategically places the tiles on the high-scoring positions on the board that wins. It is the same thing with life; it is not the fastest that usually wins in life but the most strategic. Life is a marathon, not a sprint; you need to pace yourself when running a marathon.

One of the habits of highly successful people is the art of visualizing what they aim to achieve in a day, season of life, and in their lifetime. They visualize their goals by using different strategies such as a vision board, mental visualization, and journaling. Celebrities such as Jim Carrey, Drake, J.K. Rowlings, Will Smith, Micheal Phelps, Tiger Woods, and Oprah Winfrey have all attributed visualization as a factor in their success. As the saying goes “Be careful what you ask for, you might get it.” Our subconscious mind doesn’t distinguish between fact, fiction, and reality. Research shows that 95% of our day is spent in the subconscious mind, we are on autopilot most of the time, thinking the same thoughts, ruminating on the same things, and making the same decisions.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. – Carl Jung

Exit mobile version