The Road to Success

Success is something that we all clamour for throughout our lives. A sizable chunk of our efforts is directed towards this end. However, despite our zeal to succeed, success does remain quite elusive. What is it that makes some people click while others fail? A lot of people will tell you that the path to success is marked by the dint of sheer hard work and effort. They will tell you that you just have to put in your efforts and success will surely follow, sooner or later. That statement does hold true but just sheer hard work won’t do. What a lot of us don’t comprehend is that success is also a mind game. With same amount of effort, one person might succeed while another might fail miserably in his endeavour. If we set a few things straight in our minds, the path to success might not be all that excruciating.

The initial and most crucial step to success is to start believing in oneself. This is where a lot of us go awry and hence miss out on a lot of success in life. Almost all of us heavily underestimate our competence and intelligence. We have a predetermined attitude towards things and it is generally not in the affirmative. Quite often, we believe that we can’t achieve or attain something even before we embark on the journey to get it. When you already are asserting to yourself that you won’t be able to do it, you most probably would not. Hence our attitude and outlook towards our goals should the first thing to go for a makeover. Believing that you will be able to achieve something is the first step towards achieving it. So from the next time you embark on a mission, start in the affirmative rather than relying on pessimism. Yeah, it is a tad difficult to implement at first but gradually it becomes a part of our system. We need to understand that negative thoughts and pessimism will not lead us anywhere while it would definitely erode our chances of succeeding. Positive thoughts do not cost a thing but go a long way in aiding us in succeeding in our efforts.

So would just optimism be enough to take us all the way? Nah, one has move a step further. Now that one is moving in the right direction, one has to decide where he or she wants to go. Unless you know where you are going, you will definitely end up elsewhere. Not knowing where we are headed is another big drawback in most of us. Quite a few of us have a fatalistic approach to life and we believe that destiny will lead us to our destined fates. This approach to life is a result of going about life aimlessly because without targets, whatever we achieve is by the grace of god. A fixed quantified target helps us visualize and sail smoothly through the path to success. A vague target generally makes the journey much more arduous.

Another very important ingredient for success in life is creativity. Being creative goes a long way in helping us achieve difficult tasks. Every person deals with a situation in a unique way but generally it is seen that most of us take the oft-treaded path as it is the least risky. Treading on a new path requires a lot more effort and patience as there are no signs to show us the way out but a person who takes old paths can never discover new destinations. Similarly, getting to higher levels of achievement requires us to be extremely creative.

One might ponder why all this is so necessary. Obviously, success has no prerequisites as such and one can succeed without having a fixed goal or without much creativity. The old adage that “Success breeds success and failure breeds failure” still has a lot of relevance today. Once we learn to visualize our goals and start achieving them with a sense of optimism, success will slowly but surely become an integral part of our lives.