How To Become The Success Story You Desire
Almost two in five (37%) of people in the United States believe that the American Dream is less attainable today than it was for previous generations. Fewer (29%) believe it’s more attainable today than it was for prior generations, while 16 percent say it’s no more or less attainable now. The reason for this diverse belief about attaining one’s dreams is because the majority of people have not been taught about the hidden map. Everyone has a hidden map inside that is waiting to guide us to our dreams, step-by-step-by-step, with ease and empowerment!
Your inner map is the real secret to making positive thinking and diligent work, work for you, so you can accomplish more of your goals, in less time, and begin to embody the vibrant life you deserve and desire.
You’ve probably heard of this map, but knowing a map exists doesn’t give you access to it. Allow me to illuminate the keys to ultimate success.
1. Decide What Success Means to You
If you haven’t defined what success means to you, how will you know when you are achieving success?
Is success having enough money or more money than you might ever need that allows you to feel and judge yourself a success? Is it having a beautiful house worth more than $2,000,000 in an expensive housing area?
Is it about having a loving partner who supports you in your endeavors? Do you equally support each other?
Is it through the tertiary education roadmap that you only feel validated if you make a meaningful and successful contribution to help the world economy turn? Is that your definition of success or is it someone else’s? Maybe your mom’s or your dad’s?
When her daughter Christina found her mother on the floor of her office, in a pool of blood having hit her head and breaking her cheekbone when she fell, CEO of Thrive Global and celebrated author of Thrive, Ariana Huffington had a wake-up call in more ways than one. [1]
The exhaustion and overwhelming stress which had led to her fainting drove Huffington to radically introduce new work ethics, values, and rules she believed were the only legitimate rules.
More than two decades after her fall, Huffington still leads the conversational charge amongst global leaders to change the badge of honor that successful people need to work 24/7, and give everything of themselves and more, even if it means compromising their health.
As opposed to letting power and money be the two measurements of success, she explains wisdom, well-being, wonder and giving will bring you greater success by nurturing your psychological well-being.
We can’t argue with Huffington that without that, we are proverbially dead in the water.
Warren Buffet stated the way he defines success nowadays has nothing to do with money:
“I measure success by how many people love me and how many people I love.”
You will fall in love with the wisdom and nobility these words reflect, but keeping it as your only definition of success is foolhardy. Lacking today’s wisdom at 20 years of age, would Buffet have had the same definition of success?
Think about where you are on your journey. You are likely to have different goals and different measures of success as you navigate your roadmap. Huffington and Buffet explain non-tangible ideas of success are crucial for our overall success.
Let’s also not forget though that through tenacity, persistence, and many other success habits, these business leaders also rate extremely high on the power and money metrics. However, that’s not all there is to it.
If you are not sure how you would answer if someone asked you what your definition of success is, here are some suggestions.
1. Success is doing your best.
Success can be achieved when you Do your best in all aspects of everything you do, even if that doesn’t lead to big results. If you’ve done your best, you can be proud of your efforts.
2. Success is setting concrete goals.
Be realistic and concrete when setting goals. Success does not come from setting abstract goals. If you know where you’re heading, that is a success in itself, even if you don’t ultimately arrive to the planned destination.
3. Success is being you and providing for yourself. Your home is your foundation.
Home is where your heart soars. You are successful when you call a place home. Home doesn’t have to be a specific structure. It can be a country, a city, or even a person. If you have a place you are comfortable and safe, you have already achieved something great. GIVE yourself credit for every success.
4. Success is understanding the difference between need and desire.
If you can meet your monthly obligations and fulfill your basic needs, you are successful. Being able to identify when you absolutely need something and when you can do without it often leads to financial stability and is a great way to succeed.
5. Success is believing you can.
If you believe you can, you will succeed. Self-belief doesn’t come naturally to everyone, so if you’re able to tell yourself that you can achieve the goals in your plans, you’re doing great. If you think you can or think you can’t you are right. ~Henry Ford
When people don’t believe in you, you still need to work on your own confidence! ~Find people who are supportive.
6. Success is remembering to balance work with passion.
Work without passion creates undue stress and empty achievements. Focus on what excites you. If you’re happy at your job, that’s great. However, even if you aren’t, you can balance your formal job with hobbies or volunteer work you’re passionate about.
7. Success is taking care of your needs.
Remember to put on your own oxygen mask before assisting others. Self-care is essential if you want to have any meaningful impact on the world around you. If you are exhausted more often than not, you need to take a step back to determine if your goals need another pair of hands.
8. Success is learning that you sometimes need to say ‘No’.
Success only comes with a balanced life. Part of balance is learning to say no. Saying no doesn’t mean you are selfish; it simply means you have priorities and know what you need to give your attention to at any given time.
9. Success is knowing your life is filled with abundance. Money isn’t the end all be all. Your mental/emotional and physical health is more valuable.
Love, health, friends, family…life is filled with abundance. Recognizing this is an important step to feeling grateful for all life and your efforts have given you. If you can feel this, you are already experiencing success.
10. Success is understanding you cannot keep what you don’t give away.
You will only succeed if you help others succeed. Learning to give instead of only focusing on your desires is part of creating a world we all want to live in. When you help others, you will also create an environment where others will help you.
11. Success is overcoming fear.
Resolving fear assists you to sense invincible. Even if it’s confronting just one small fear each week, that is certainly something to be proud of. The bigger fears will take more time, but any work you do to overcome fear will lead to success.
12. Success is learning something new each day.
Successful people understand that learning is ongoing. Take time each day to converse with someone with opposing views, read an interesting article on a topic you know little about, or watch a TED talk on the topic or issue you are focusing on. It doesn’t take long to learn, so the best time to start is now.
13. Success is learning that losing a few battles can help you win the big rewards.
Successful people choose their battles wisely. When you know which battles will ultimately help you achieve your goals, you will be successful.
14. Success is loving and being loved back.
Opening your heart to others isn’t taught and can produce fear. Having the courage to love and accept love from others is a step toward a fulfilling life and great success.
15. Success is standing your ground when you believe in something.
Successful people never give up on things they believe with all their heart. You may hold views that many people disagree with, but if you’ve done your research and know that it’s the right belief for you, you need to give it your all even if you need to go back to the drawing board to discover a different course of action.
16. Success is diligence and perseverance.
Diligence and perseverance creates grit, and grit achieves success. Even if it takes years to achieve a goal, diligence and persistence is key if you desire success.
When you get stuck and think giving up is the answer, remind yourself what you’re striving for. As long as you have a strong “reason” you will be able to persist. Don’t know if your “reason” is strong enough? This is the time to do inner work to clear out the negative and self limiting thoughts with a professional or listening to strategies to move yourself to the next level. Youtube has thousands of ‘self-help’ audios or videos.
17. Success is celebrating every victory–small, medium and large.
Anytime a goal is reached or an obstacle is overcome, take time to celebrate, even if it’s something small. All goals require smaller objectives to be achieved first, so each time you complete one, take time to appreciate the work you put into it. And if you are inclined ‘thank’ your spiritual guides and angels.
18. Success is resisting letting a disability hold you back.
Disabilities do not define a person’s success. The body and mind will compensate. Just because you can’t do absolutely everything doesn’t mean you can’t do something. Do what your body and mind allow and challenge yourself. That is true success.
19. Success is understanding that you control your destiny.
Your destiny is controlled by you and you alone. Take responsibility for your action and inaction and their consequences and you’ll find that you naturally become more successful. The blame game doesn’t resolve anything.
When you have your map you can begin to chart your success story. Everyone’s map is different. You can go back to your map whenever you are wondering what to do next or if you need to clear the windows of your mind and soul to get clarity.
The Bottom Line
Success can be defined in many ways. If you are experiencing happiness, love, or adventure in this moment, you’ve already found success. Keep it up.
As your head hits the pillow and before you close your eyes, what’s most important is that you can internalize that you have chosen your definition of success and you will take full responsibility and accountability for deciding upon it.
1. Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow: Discovering Your Right Livelihood by Marsha Sinetar
2. Review Your Progress and Satisfaction in Life
Review the main areas of your life. Not only those where you feel you need to make changes. Review all of them:
- Your career vocation or business life;
- Your relationships – your intimate or life partner, family, and friends;
- Money health and financial management strategies;
- Commitment to your faith or religion and spiritual personal development;
- Your physical and mental health;
What leisure or recreational activities do you pursue for fun to energize your spirit and enrich your soul?
Do you have ideas of what success looks like for you in each of these areas?
Neglecting to look at even one area is like expecting to restore function to a beautifully crafted Swiss watch, whilst failing to attend to a rusty-looking cog in the tiny internal workings that needs attention. Turn one cog, the others all turn. Ignore a damaged one, the system malfunctions. The same applies to everything in your life.
For each area, give yourself a rating one to ten – one signifies the least satisfaction and ten signifies the most – and ask yourself the following questions to help you start identifying what’s important to you:
- How satisfied or content with this area of my life am I presently?
- Where would I like to live this current level of contentment to?
- What would that new level of satisfaction look like, feel like?
- How important is this area compared with the other areas of my life?
Regardless of what areas you recognize need to be your core focus, consider making personal development and improvements to your physical and mental health, and well-being a constant feature of your action plan.
You will need to continually recognize obstacles you’ll face from your outside world, as well as those internal psychological battles that will arise from within.
Without your mental and physical health intact, it’s unlikely the rest of the ‘cogs’ are going to turn properly.
3. Understand Your Values and Priorities
Avoid making the mistake of thinking goal setting can be done in one sitting. You want to make sure the pursuits you put down on paper aren’t fly-by-night moments of excitement that ebb and flow with the rise and fall of tidal trends.
Become better at identifying your priorities by exploring how you feel about each of your life areas. Think about the ratings of satisfaction you might have denoted for each. And now write down what you want to be, do and have.
Put aside your initial literary ramblings and revisit them in a couple of weeks or one month. Without looking at your initial thoughts, do the process again and see what consistencies show up. What keeps coming up as feeling important? Around what ideas is there the same yearning or emotional pull?
If you’re unsure about what you feel you wish to head towards, be in allowance of this. Don’t be jumping to quickly fill the void. The desperation is likely to have you catching the tail of the last exciting concept in fear of missing out or trying to fill the void of excitement you yearn for.
Increase your practice of pausing and asking yourself:
Why does this resonate with me? Could this be a distraction that complicates the route I have mapped out? Am I becoming that person who proverbially chases two rabbits and catches none?
In his book The Heart of Love, Dr. John Demartini explains how becoming strongly aware of your values and priorities helps you understand why you are and where you are in your life at any given moment.
If you don’t know what you believe you stand for, look at where you direct your time, energy, and attention. Look at your behavior and work backward.
You might think making money and creating financial wealth is high on your radar. However, if you spend more than you earn and allocate money to depreciating objects as opposed to appreciating assets, your behavior is inconsistent with those typical of someone who is financially astute.
Look back to your areas of life and ask yourself if the goals you have set are in alignment with your values. Look at your daily behaviors and ask yourself if the way you operate satisfies steps that take you further toward those goals.
If not, all is not lost. You’ve simply got some harsh truths and reality checks to face before you can go any further on your roadmap to success.
4. Work with a Success Coach
You have to come to terms with the fact that you’re likely to be swimming against the tide.
Once you make clear unwavering decisions about what goals you’re aiming for, prepare to be un-liked, unpopular, criticized, and potentially ostracized. There’s a high possibility you’ll lose the friendship and support of some, however you will gain new friends and the support of others.
Regardless of what area of life your goals pertain to, make room to work with a coach. Choose wisely who that person will be to encourage and walk beside you.
Whether it be a certified coach, a family friend/mentor, or a qualified business mentor, find someone who knows how to work with the specific issues and challenges that lay ahead without any agenda other than your success.
Having that impartial guide can be an invaluable constant. This helps keep you on the straight and narrow even if other areas of your life aren’t going swimmingly.
5. Become Intimately Familiar with Your Habits and Behaviors
Despite the scientific evidence in support of it, we’re not recommending you need to start getting up at 5:00 am and exercising for an hour before you even think about starting your day.
You need to ask yourself these questions more frequently:
- How well do I know my habits and routine ways of operating?
- Do I know what choices and patterned behaviors help or hinder me?
You know what you want to work on. Greater clarity on your values has enabled you to discern which priorities are high on your list and which ones are low. It’s now time to reinforce and reward the habits that carry you forward on your roadmap to success, and adjust those habits which delay or divert you from staying on course.
Procrastination is the biggest detriment to achieving your goals. Prioritize your “To Do’ list and follow it faithfully.
Remember that part of the joy of the human experience is to be fallible, so don’t suddenly shelve all those character-building ‘vices’. Your flaws are a necessary part of your unique success jigsaw puzzle; they are the inspiring reasons you’re going on this journey in the first place.
Demartini and New York Times journalist and author Charles Duhigg both explain in their books how recognizing your unhelpful behavioral patterns needs to take place first. You identify the emotional and psychological rewards which rule over whether you sustain, break or make a new habit.
When you know the rewards that light you up like a Christmas tree, you link them to new or modified habits that support values you want to make a higher priority. you love eating out. You love artisan cuisine and get giddy at watching the episode of Heston Blumenthal creating chocolate water in his food chemistry laboratory. As much as you say you want to increase your investment in appreciating assets, your spending habits speak otherwise.
For example, you might start looking for discount opportunities on your higher-end dining. The dishes may not rival Heston’s masterpieces, but your taste buds still enjoy a culinary roller coaster AND you also know to get feel-good allocating the discounted amount to a saving’s program.
Your tummy is singing as is your bank account. The whole experience goes well beyond short-term gratification and satisfies several values and goals.
Tweaking habits and forming new ones isn’t difficult; it’s a matter of finding a happy experience. Take time to find it. There are many ways to achieve your success.
6. Celebrate Your Wins and Monitor Your Progress Along the Way
You need to become good at deliberately rewarding yourself when you make changes that take you further along your roadmap to success.
Professor of cognitive neuroscience Dr. Tali Sharot explains how the brain responds and adapts far better to rewards than punishment when it comes to learning behavior and creating new habits.[2]
When we apply admonishment, we reinforce the traumatic memory as being more important than the actual lesson we might have been meant to learn in the first place.
When we gamify rewards on our success journey, we inject fun and humor. We also reduce the stress that often comes with learning new things, habits and adjusting to new ways of being, doing, and having.
Last, but not least Thoughts
If you hit a progress plateau at any point, allow yourself to plateau and switch your attention to another priority.
The switch will allow you to think more freely and clearly about how to move past your roadblock. Or it might be a good time to stop and smell the roses.
Your muscles grow stronger in their resting phase after a workout. Animals hunt profusely to build up their energy stores before going into hibernation.
Remember that continually forging ahead is not a natural rhythm. Repeat the cycle of rest, recovery, and rallying forward then…start again.
Now that you know your hidden map inside that is waiting to guide you to your dreams, step-by-step-by-step, with ease and empowerment you will create it.
This inner map is the real secret to making positive thinking and diligent work, work for you, so you can accomplish more of your goals, in less time, and begin to embody the vibrant life you deserve and desire.
Is success having enough money or more money than you might ever need that allows you to feel and judge yourself a success? Is it having a beautiful house worth more than $2,000,000 in an expensive housing area?
Is it about having a loving partner who supports you in your endeavors? Do you equally support each other?
Is it through the tertiary education roadmap that you only feel validated if you make a meaningful and successful contribution to help the world economy turn? Is that your definition of success or is it someone else’s? Maybe your mom’s or your dad’s?
When her daughter Christina found her mother on the floor of her office, in a pool of blood having hit her head and breaking her cheekbone when she fell, CEO of Thrive Global and celebrated author of Thrive, Ariana Huffington had a wake-up call in more ways than one.[1]
The exhaustion and overwhelming stress which had led to her fainting drove Huffington to radically introduce new work ethics, values, and rules she believed were the only legitimate rules.
More than two decades after her fall, Huffington still leads the conversational charge amongst global leaders to change the badge of honor that successful people need to work 24/7, and give everything of themselves and more, even if it means compromising their health.
As opposed to letting power and money be the two measurements of success, she explains wisdom, well-being, wonder and giving will bring you greater success by nurturing your psychological well-being.
We can’t argue with Huffington that without that, we are proverbially dead in the water.
Warren Buffet stated the way he defines success nowadays has nothing to do with money:
“I measure success by how many people love me and how many people I love.”
You will fall in love with the wisdom and nobility these words reflect, but keeping it as your only definition of success is foolhardy. Lacking today’s wisdom at 20 years of age, would Buffet have had the same definition of success?
Think about where you are on your journey. You are likely to have different goals and different measures of success as you navigate your roadmap. Huffington and Buffet explain non-tangible ideas of success are crucial for our overall success.
Let’s also not forget though that through tenacity, persistence, and many other success habits, business leaders also rate extremely high on the power and money metrics. However, that’s not all there is to it.
Published: November 8, 2022