How To Be Successful!
What makes me qualified to write about success as if I knew anything about it? Plenty. I don’t have a degree from some prestigious university, but I do have something infinitely better; experience. I recently wrote something about our infinite potential. I made analogies between infinite lines and our infinite potential. The point I’m making here is: we need to make a decision about how we view things. Are the things that we fail to do correctly really failures?
Failures
The things we fail to do correctly can be failures as long as that’s what we want to consider them. There is a better way. First, recognize that a failed attempt is a learning opportunity. Second, let’s admit that something didn’t happen the way we wanted it to. Third, let’s look at what we did and try to determine what we did wrong. Fourth, don’t repeat the pattern. Fifth, recognize that there may be a time lag between our actions and the results. There have been numerous times that I quit before the results started to show up and looking back at the success of others doing the same thing, I realized that I just didn’t continue to work at it. Which brings up a good point: maybe we didn’t want to succeed with what we were trying to do in the first place? Maybe our heart really wasn’t into what we had casually committed ourselves to? There could be any number of reasons but, I suspect that the two reasons I gave are the primary cause of many of our so called failures.
Let’s look at some of the causes of our so called failures:
We don’t want to succeed
A lack of belief
We followed the wrong advice
Maybe we didn’t want to succeed
This is worth investigating. I know from my own experience that there are times that I started to do something and after I started, I began to recognize aspects of my mission that didn’t live up to my real goals. In other words: I picked the wrong action according to my current values. And there were times when I started something that I decided wasn’t worth the effort so I stopped. Does this mean that I was a failure? In a way, since I stopped before I got the results I initially wanted, I failed. Maybe there wasn’t anything wrong with what I wanted only the way I was attempting to get what I wanted. Here’s an example from my own experience:Years ago I started into a network marketing business. I won’t mention which one but, I will tell you that it was the granddaddy of all legal network marketing ideas. I put a lot of effort into it for a while but I kept running into a problem that I couldn’t shake. I was having to do things that went against the grain of one of my most cherished beliefs: Seventh Day Sabbath Keeping. Now, I’m not making a plea here for you to begin keeping the Seventh Day Sabbath; what I am doing is relating something that I recognized that required a compromise on my part in order for me to be successful at this network marketing scheme. All of the vital meetings that I had committed myself to keeping took place on the Seventh Day Sabbath. It was business oriented and I often felt guilty when I attended them. I couldn’t see a way around this as I’d have to promote these activities to others and I couldn’t justify doing them if I wouldn’t promote this activity to other Seventh Day Sabbath Keepers. I kept trying to tell myself that I could choose to do as I pleased after I was successful. Who could argue with success? But, I was lying to myself; I couldn’t succeed with something that I felt was wrong. So, after five years of halfhearted effort, I quit.
I wanted financial success so that I could dig myself out of the financial morass I had gotten myself into and I had been convinced by the success of others that I could do it also. What my failure with this particular endeavor showed wasn’t that I was a miserable failure; it showed that I ultimately wouldn’t go against my core beliefs.
Am I so unique that nobody out there has felt the same way? I know that I’m not that unique so maybe you can find some truth in this that will help you.
I’m out of time for today so I’ll add more tomorrow.
Katrael
