How to Make a Success of Your Life
Developing a vision for your life
It’s important to have a clear vision of where you want to
be in life. If you know exactly what you want to achieve and where you want to
end up, it becomes easier to make decisions that will get you there. It takes
away a lot of the indecision and confusion about how you should be filling your
time if you know what the results are that you want to see.
If you want to be a social worker, for example, you focus on
this vision clearly and make choices that will bring you closer and closer to
this dream. You will rather choose to spend your extra earnings on doing a
counseling course than spend it on a new DVD player, because the one gets you
closer to your dream. If you didn’t have a clear vision of where you wanted to
be, you wouldn’t be able to measure what you’re doing to get there.
You also need to reinforce this vision very often. The more
often you remember what you want and remind yourself what you’re going for, the
less you’ll be distracted by things that don’t matter as much. Put up a
reminder of your vision for your life somewhere visible in your home. Put it as
a background image or screensaver on your PC, phone or tablet. Talk about your
dream often or even start a blog about it. Everything you do to make your
vision more real and to keep it alive will help you to get there eventually.
Be brave enough to claim your dreams. Don’t be afraid to say
where you’re going with your life. The more you talk about it and show that
you’re proud and confident of what you’re working towards, the more you might
be able to get others to believe in you and even support you along the way.
A good tool that many people use to remind themselves of
their goals is by making a vision board or writing a list of the things they
really want. On your vision board you could put pictures of the life you want
to live. Make it clear, vibrant and happy. Fill it with positive, inspiring
messages. No one will believe in your dream unless you believe in it yourself
first, so be very clear about what you want for your life and start owning that
dream.
Having a clear vision for your relationships, work, hobbies,
interests or even the things you want to own or accomplish is a powerful first
step in living the life of your dreams and unlocking your true potential.
What is your ultimate potential?
The truth is that you have limitless potential to make your
life amazing. When you limit your goals and vision because you think it’ll be
too hard to get there, you’re feeding yourself the message that you’re not
capable of doing the amazing things you want to do.
Those people who have the greatest success first needed to
believe in what they have to offer the world. You need to trust that your
unique contribution is worthwhile. Even if there are a thousand other bakers in
your city, you need to know that if your passion is to bake, you can make a
success of it. There is always room for another person with passion and drive
in the world. You might just have to find a new, unique way to do what you want
to do.
Your ultimate potential, just like with everyone else, is
limitless. But you do need to remember that most of the time, things will not
work out exactly the way that you want, and you might not be able to reach your
dreams in exactly the way you thought you would.
For example, when she was a child, Hillary Clinton initially
wanted to become an astronaut and sent a letter to NASA, but she was told at
the time that they would not accept women into their space program. She
realized that she had incredible potential for greatness, but she encountered a
roadblock to her dream. Instead of simply giving up on reaching success, she
refocused her energy into politics and eventually became the Secretary of State
of the United States, one of the most senior governmental positions. Finding
new ways to use the potential that you have when you encounter certain dead
ends can lead you to discover dreams that you never even considered before.
Be willing to recognize your talents and to nurture your dreams,
but don’t be held down by them. If you find a new way of expanding yourself and
demonstrating your talents, go in that direction. Move in the direction of
opportunity and growth, and you can reach your full potential in life.
What is your true measure of success?
Lots of people think that being successful means being
extremely rich, having a trophy husband or wife, and being in a position of
great power over other people. While this might give some people a feeling of
authentic success, it’s not the final vision of a truly satisfying life for all
of us. Sometimes, having all of these things might make you seem successful in
the eyes of others, but it could actually mean that you are squandering your
potential if you choose to simply live your life in order to be admired by
other people or to fulfil this simplistic definition of success.
We definitely need to have enough money to do the things we
need to do in order to be successful. We definitely need to have power over our
lives. But more money and power does not necessarily mean more success.
You can see this in the example mentioned above of J.K.
Rowling, who gave away a large portion of her wealth to charity and chose to
expand beyond the book series that made her rich so that she could follow her
creative passion.
You can also see this with someone like Mark Shuttleworth,
the billionaire South African businessman, who stepped down as CEO of his
company, instead spending a lot of his time pursuing his passion for
spaceflight and developing his nonprofit organization which funds social innovation,
education and free and open source software projects.
Many of these people know that the money and power alone
won’t equal the feeling of real success. It can help you to do the things you
want, but you can still pursue the things you want without needing more and
more money and power.
Even if you feel that success means having the newest car,
the most popular song or the most attractive partner, all of these things will
fade. There will be newer models of cars, a more popular song and a more
attractive person sooner than you know. If you only measure success on
superficial things, it will always be ephemeral and you’ll never be satisfied.
Real success means achieving something that has real meaning
and significance to you, and living a life that gives you joy and fulfilment
every day. It means doing a job that you really love doing, where you
contribute in a way that makes you feel valued. It means working with people in
a way that is mutually beneficial. It means having strong, genuine
relationships with others. It means feeling satisfied at the end of the day,
not feeling like your energy is being wasted.
When you are reaching your full potential, you are finding
new ways to do the things that really make you feel this way. This means using
your talents in order to achieve goals that reflect the ideas listed above. You
should be able to know that every day you’ve done something challenging, but
you’ve done your best and you’ve grown.
Real success is giving your heart and soul to work that
makes your own life and the lives of others better.
You don’t need to be the best at something, the leader of
something or the wealthiest person around to feel this level of real success.
If you always measure your level of success by these things, you might be
missing out on really living the life of your dreams because you are living the
life that others want you to live. If you want to really reach your full
potential you need to begin measuring your success on things that you really
want, not what the characters on television, your parents or anyone else says
you should want to be or have. Being authentic allows you to truly be fulfilled
in life.
The most successful people say that they are self-motivated.
This means that they don’t look at what other people want from them, but they
develop their own goals and have real, authentic reasons for pursuing these
goals.
If you are simply applying for a job to impress someone
else, you will never truly love that job or feel like an authentic success. If
you are only doing something because it’s seen as a respectable thing to do,
you won’t feel satisfied at the end of the day.
Think of all the things that really make you feel happy and
that you really want to accomplish one day, no matter what other people think.
Use these things to frame the vision for your life.
Your past doesn’t define you
While it’s definitely easier for some people to get certain
jobs and do certain impressive things with their lives because they were raised
with privileges, this does not mean that these people are successful. In fact,
lots of people doing things that you might find really respectable, like
businesspeople, doctors, lawyers or politicians, are deeply dissatisfied with
their lives and wish that they could be doing something else. Despite their
advantages in life and the fact that they have a lot of money, power and
prestige, they don’t really feel successful and they are not living up to their
full potential.
Many of the people who achieve the greatest successes, and
who really feel fulfilled and satisfied with their lives, are those who have
come from the most challenging circumstances or have faced the most adversity.
These people know what they’re working for and why they want to achieve what
they are achieving in life. These are also the people who often use their
influence in order to make the world better for people who come from similar
disadvantaged backgrounds.
Oprah Winfrey is the prime example of overcoming adversity
and using her background to really change the world. She was born to a single
teenage mother in rural Mississippi. Her family was very poor. She was raped
and sexually abused throughout her childhood, starting at age nine, and became
pregnant at age 14, eventually losing her child in infancy.
However, she worked and studied exceptionally hard,
eventually earning her own talk show which ran for 25 years, and she is
currently North America’s only black billionaire.
Oprah did what she really loved to do, and found incredible
success doing it.
The money, power and influence weren’t enough for her, and
she extended her reach to make the world a better place through many
philanthropic works, including building a leadership academy for girls in South
Africa. She also still takes chances and has greater goals, realizing that she still
has the potential for greater things.
Oprah is just one of many examples of people who overcame
the struggles of their pasts to truly make their lives a success. Your past
does not define what your life can become, and it doesn’t have to hold you
back. No matter what the circumstances of your life are right now, people who
were in similar circumstances achieved great successes. You can too.
Find a story of someone who faced the same struggles that
you are facing and still went on to live the life of their dreams. Use this
story to motivate you to go for what you want in life. Don’t allow your
personal history to weigh you down from reaching what your life could be.
Anything really is possible for you
The biggest problem is that people limit themselves in their
thinking. They imagine that all the excuses they can list for why they are not
successful yet, or the obstacles they are facing that make it difficult for
them to change, are good enough reasons to stay exactly where they are. They
don’t allow themselves to see that they are capable of so much more.
Don’t be one of the people who is constantly held back by
their fear or by the idea that they simply don’t have what it takes to succeed.
You have what it takes, and you can exceed your wildest dreams if you simply
follow the steps of success which many others have followed to get them where
they are today.
You are not any different from anyone else. If you do all of
the things that will take you towards your dream, eventually you will get
there. Maybe your dream will change a bit along the way, but it will still be
worth fighting for a life that you truly want to live and using your talents
and passions to make your life extraordinary.
In the next section I’ll explore many of the common strategies which people follow in order to unlock their potential. It won’t be easy to get there, but it will be worth it.
Click on the next blog post to continue reading.