Life’s Principles That Guarantee Success
You’ll often hear people explain away someone else’s success by saying, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know!”
It’s easy to discount another person’s achievement by putting it down to their position of privilege… to believe that the only reason they made it was because they received a leg-up, or a head start… to succumb to the dangerous thinking that says, “they have something that I don’t”.
Whenever you think this, your mental frame is that:
- It was easier for them
- Or that they found a shortcut that wasn’t available to you
- Or that if you had the same advantages, you’d be where they are (but you don’t so you aren’t)
- Or, that you know more than they do (or you work harder, or you’re better qualified, or… whatever)! But they’re more successful because they have relationships that you don’t have
What I’m about to say is incredibly important…
As soon as you start to make those kinds of excuses, you’re letting yourself off the hook. You accept the fact that you can’t be as successful as that person, when in reality, there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t.
It pushes you into victim mentality. It cements your external locus of control: “I can’t change things, or I can’t be as successful as someone else, because they have access to something that I don’t.”
Once you fall into this victim mentality… once you believe that there is some magical ingredient that you don’t have access to, your whole frame of reference changes.
You feel as though life is unfair, and despite all your hard work, ingenuity, and knowledge, there’s something beyond your control that’s stopping you. This mindset is dangerously limiting!
There’s a wide array of ingredients that contribute to the recipe for success, and they’re pretty consistent no matter which area of life you apply them to: career, parenting, health, romantic relationships…
In Ep.138 of the podcast, I distilled my life experience into the 10 ingredients that I believe are most conducive to success. These are the things that I found to be true for me, over an extended period of time.
And, having earned these scars the hard way, I want to relate them to you, in the hope that you can streamline your efforts, and focus your energies in the right areas. To get to where I did, faster than me.
Collectively, these 10 ingredients form an ecosystem for success… an environment where success is more likely to flourish than if that ecosystem wasn’t in place.
If you want to grow plants, the ecosystem is critical – the condition of the soil… the availability of air, sunlight, and water… perhaps even whether you play a Mozart violin sonata to them each night.
Plants in a poor ecosystem don’t survive… but in a favorable ecosystem, they grow and thrive.
In the success ecosystem, building the right relationships, and hanging around with the people you aspire to be like, is just as important as your hard work and tenacity.
You also need to accept that your own individual impact will eventually be dwarfed by the quality of your team. So your ultimate success relies almost entirely on your ability to build a team that has high performing, driven, ambitious people on it.
As knowledge becomes more commoditized, it’s your wisdom, insight, and ability to interpret the context that will be the difference between career success and failure.
Don’t lull yourself into surrender, by saying “I could have been a contender”… it’s never too late to work on building your success ecosystem!