Have you ever found yourself either marveling at someone else’s success or emotionally breaking down, wondering why your time hasn’t come yet?
Maybe you’ve told yourself that you gave that new project your all. Perhaps you lost interest in your latest business venture. Or, maybe the universe was giving you signs just to cut your losses and give up after a few unpleasant bouts with defeat. Sometimes we’re left wondering if success is even in the cards for us.
Sure, on the outside looking in, all we see are the shiny, finished products from the people we idolize, whether it be millions in sales, millions of followers, or purely large-scale success in a field of interest that you may have. We rarely consider what went into achieving such exceptional results in the first place.
This article will discuss the five fundamental principles that guarantee success. When applied wholeheartedly, they ensure your success in anything you desire to achieve.
We all know that taking two-hour breaks at a time between working on your goals is a recipe for disaster, just like we know that time-wasting tasks like spending days deciding on the best color pallet for your website will not move the needle when it comes to seeing actual results.
If you want to succeed in business or at any goals or objectives you’ve set, you first must develop good habits that rule your life. Good habits are the key to success in any venture. They help us stay focused and consistent in our efforts, which is essential when working towards a goal.
You can develop proper habits for achieving success, but taking complete account of what you aim to accomplish and assessing what you’re currently doing may be counterproductive in your pursuit of success.
Decide what’s essential for reaching your goals and start developing habits that eventually happen on autopilot without consciously thinking about them. Some examples of good habits include:
These are just a few examples, but the point is that good habits will help you stay on track and focused on your goals, which is essential for achieving success.
This one is major. It could be easily listed at the very top of the list. Persistence is the foundation, structure, and glue to your ultimate success.
Let’s face it – life is full of challenges on the business and personal side. We’re either hit with dozens of no’s, don’t have enough financing to fund our businesses, or may have underestimated the amount of marketing and work that goes into gaining traction for a new product or service we’re offering.
In times like this, we have two choices: retreat or persist.
It’s staggering how many people opt to retreat; on the surface, it’s hard to blame them. No one likes failure, and it can feel like punishment every time we hit a wall when someone tells us to know or the momentum for your project or business is growing at a snail’s pace.
We often don’t give ourselves enough time to endure these challenging times, not realizing that we’re usually just three feet from gold. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and the rich didn’t get rich overnight. Their riches came after painstaking behind-the-scenes work that many didn’t have the opportunity to see happening.
As long as your business venture is sound and there’s a demand for what your offering, it’s imperative that you strive to maintain an unrelenting sense of persistence. It is persistence that will inevitably get you over the hump and have you join the ranks of other success stories.
The alternative is unfulfillment, dissatisfaction, and regret. Don’t let the pain of “no” and the slow grinding process stop you from moving forward. If you have to move forward in tears, do that. You’ll soon find that your tears of sorrow are transformed into tears of joy as positive results start to take shape and block out any thought about the pain you once suffered to get to where you now stand proudly.
Many of us get caught up in worrying about things that may have happened yesterday or what may happen tomorrow rather than living in the present. To achieve entrepreneurial success, we need to focus our energy on what we can control – each moment in the present.
While you should plan for the future, you should not worry about what lies in the future. Focus your energy on accomplishing tasks today that increase your chances for positive results tomorrow. Stressing about how many conversions you’ll get on an ad campaign you plan to launch tomorrow will do you no good.
Instead, do your best to ensure that you have the correct title text, call-to-action, landing page set up, etc., to give yourself the best edge. Everything else will fall into place as it should if you give your best effort and act as if it’s your last chance to do your best work.
Don’t let fear, procrastination, or doubt disrupt your progression. Drop the thoughts overpowering your mind about what you did wrong today or what may go wrong tomorrow and instead give today the best version of you that you have as if you won’t have another chance to do so.
Self-improvement is another fundamental key to success. There’s always more to learn and new ways to improve in life. You should set a cap on your growth. Sure, you may have been a lead project manager for two decades and think that you’ve reached your peak or that there’s nothing more to learn.
But maybe, over that time, new technology, systems, or techniques have been implemented to improve your skills and production. You’ll never know unless you’re constantly pursuing to become a better version of yourself. In summary, you should aim to make self-improvement an ever-growing part of your life without limiting how far you can go.
Analysis paralysis is a killer of productivity. Spend less time analyzing how to do something and spend more time doing it. Procrastination and too much studying without practice can be crippling to your success. It can lead to inaction or more dreaming rather than doing. Action is what breeds results and allows you to learn how to improve quickly and reach your goals faster. So get up and get into gear!
The above principles may seem simple and self-explanatory, but few people exercise them. Success is guaranteed to be in your favor if you commit to them aggressively and resist the urge to quit.