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Three Top Reasons You're Not a Success

Written by: Les Brown

Article Overview: If midlife finds you feeling like you're a failure, perhaps it's because you misunderstand success. There are three beliefs that can cripple even the best of us.

Three Top Reasons You're Not a Success

Let's start off with a couple of questions (with 'yes or no' answers), shall we? First question: 'Is the guy in your neighborhood whose house is in foreclosure a failure?' Second question: 'Is Donald Trump a success?'

Unless you answered these two questions differently, your definition of 'success' probably needs some adjusting. After all, both men may well have thought they were taking reasonable risks, yet both men wound up in severe financial hot water. The only two real differences between the two men may well be the size of their investments and their notoriety (neither of which have much to do with 'success'). Whether either or both of these men is truly successful or not remains to be seen. Meanwhile, we've probably uncovered a weakness in the foundations of your career: if you're not perfectly clear about what 'success' is, how will you know where to pursue it; and, even more importantly, how will you know when you've achieved it?

Let's look at the three main reasons why intelligent, committed, hard-working men (and women) like you fail to succeed. I think you'll find the discussion provocative, to say the least.

Reason #3: You believe that 'success' is static, rather than dynamic. If I were to ask you to draw a picture that represents 'success,' what would it look like? Would it be a mountain climber standing at the summit? Would it be a runner, chest thrust forward, breaking a tape at the finish line? Would it be a golfer sinking that final, impossible putt? If these images convey the idea of 'success' to you, then I would wager that, at some time or other, you've probably said to yourself, 'If only I could reach this goal, then I'd be happy!' In fact, you say this sort of thing to yourself all the time; and, every time, when you get to the point where you think that you ought to be happy, you discover that there's something else you want to strive for. In fact, once you've reached a static level of 'success', the result is never more than passing satisfaction. What you really experience is boredom.

You'll never find satisfaction so long as you consider success as a static 'line in the sand' that you've got to cross. All of these static goals represent only milestones along the way, marking your progress. In fact, you can more accurately define success as a positive direction of movement: in mathematics, 'success' would be considered a vector (a line having a beginning and a direction, but no finite end). Every step you take, every decision you make, every move in any particular direction will eventually change the outcome of your choice. You're shooting at a moving target, and the very act of taking that shot moves your target in a different direction. In the end, you can't 'achieve' success, you can only pursue it.

Reason #2: You believe that success is an end rather than a means. If you begin to realize that success can never stay stationary, you should also start to see that where you're going (the 'end') becomes less important than how you get there (the 'means'). If your 'end' — your goal — will necessarily change as you attempt to pursue it, then, regardless of what that milestone may have appeared to you to be when you started out, it's necessarily going to wind up being something quite different when you arrive there. Again, in mathematical terms, chaos theory rules! In other words, the more complex your mission is, the more unpredictable your results will be. If you let your concept of 'success' become tied to a particular outcome, you'll always end up being disappointed (even if the results turn out better than anticipated), because the 'end' will never be what you expect!

Once you can accept that your results can not be predicted with any degree of certainty and you take any particular 'end' or goal out of your equation, what will you have left? You can turn your attention away from where you're going, and focus more on what's really important: how you're going to get there. The 'how' question is much more dynamic than the 'where' question: it addresses the process rather than the product. As anyone in business should be more than happy to remind you, the quality of the product depends entirely on the quality of the process. Describe the process in any way that you want, it must have certain qualities, such as: courage, integrity, authenticity, empathy, initiative, honesty, commitment, trust, flexibility, sensitivity, and you could go on and on. Regardless of how goals and conditions may change, the truly successful man maintains his self-esteem.

Reason #1: You believe that success has to do with the past rather than the future. If you go back to the original images I asked you imagine that portrayed your concept of 'success', you'll find that, in one way or another, it consists of a sort of trophy moment: something that you can celebrate with a whoop and a holler and a jump into the air or some 'victory dance' in the end zone. You'll have an entry in the record books, a trophy on your shelf or a plaque on the wall to show for it. You'll have 'bragging rights' and the proof of and recognition for your accomplishment. OK. Fine. Now what? Regardless of whether you're the top athlete in some competition, the top salesman, or the CEO, somebody is already running up behind you looking to take your place.

All your accomplishments and all your achievements live only in the past, and will be forgotten as soon as the record books are closed. Your trophies and plaques have already become meaningless: you can't even give them away to charity. Nobody (besides you) even cares about them enough to want them. Even if it's an annual award, next year, someone else's name will be on it right underneath yours. The lesson here comes down to this: that success has little or nothing to do with your past accomplishments; it has everything to do with your vision for the future. Success can be measured by your progress forward employing the newest ideas and newest technologies to implement the most far-sighted plans. Success has nothing to do with where you've been, but everything to do with where you're going.

Have you changed your mind about how you conceive of 'success' yet? If so, that's really great! But that's not success! Now that you've been given the opportunity to change your mind, what are you going to do about it? How is today going to be different from yesterday just because you've read these words? One thing's for certain: you'll never be a success so long as you continue to think — and act — as though your success were based on some static goals that you achieved once upon a time. It all depends on what difference you're going to make tomorrow, starting right now.

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Article Tags: donald trump, failure, finish line, foreclosure, foundations, hot water, images, investments, men and women, mountain climber, neighborhood, notoriety, reason 3, satisfaction, static level, summit, two men, working men



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