The Secret to Success

The “how to succeed” business is a multi-billion dollar industry. It’s not hard to find any number of gurus out there who will tell you how to succeed at whatever you endeavor, whether it be to become wealthy, lose 30 pounds, become a writer, a model, an actor, an artist. You name it. But is there really an answer to the question?

Before coming to that, it’s important to first answer this question for yourself, “How do I define success?”

What is important to you? Is success a high paying career? Is it to own your own business? Is it to be the perfect parent, spouse, or friend? Perhaps the definition of success is no more lofty than to learn to cook meals three times a week for your family. It is not so important how you define success. It is critical that you do.

My own life and career has been filled with twists, turns, bumps, grinds, victories, defeats, what I would call successes, near misses, and total flops. In general, I always had a vision of where I wanted to be in life, but I just kind of relied on my education, instincts, and dumb luck to get there. It was only a few years ago that I developed a plan, and it took the advice of a life coach to get me to do it. Ever since, I highly recommend to everyone that they find someone that can play the role of a coach to you, no matter how much of an expert you think you are in the area in which you want to succeed.

There are at least four major categories you may wish to consider when defining success and developing a plan to get there. You can concentrate on one, some, or all of them depending on what it is you want. The four are as follows, in no particular order:

1. Current job
2. Career
3. Family (by any definition, including friends)
4. Spirituality

Spirituality is something often not addressed in the professional coaching world. It is not meant here to mean “religion,” although it certainly can. It is really meant as a category to catch all of those things that can make you a “better person.” What does it mean to you to want to be a better person?

A classic coaching technique I learned from friend and coach Rich Tafel of RLT Strategies is to help you realize success is multi-staged. For each of the major categories on which you wish to focus, repeat these steps:

1. Envision the future. What is your definition of success?
2. What is your mission or purpose?
3. What are your objectives? Long-term (5 years and beyond), mid-term, and short-term (next 6 months).
4. What are your “blind spots” (things that can hinder your success, perhaps things you do not yet recognize in yourself)?
5. What are your strengths?
6. What do you need to do to achieve your objectives?

Write all of this down. Don’t try to do it all in one sitting. Do each step one at a time and then review with your coach. With each progressing step, go back to the completed steps before. Do they still make sense? Are they on target? Refine and be good with it before going to the next step.

This is especially beneficial when considering your strengths and your objectives. Many coaching techniques will tell you to focus on your weaknesses and turn them in to strengths. But I subscribe to the school of thought that you play to your strengths. Be aware of your blind spots, but play to your strengths. Your strengths are what will carry you through.

As an example, it is perfectly fine to say, “You know, I am not really good at math and I want to be.”

Then do something about it. Make it a strength if that is what you want or what you need to succeed. But as you do so, play to your strengths. Maybe you are really great socially. In this example, don’t try to improve math skills on your own. Join a class and form a study group. With the study group, you are playing to your strength as a social extrovert.

Now comes the tough part. Follow through. Do the things you need to do to achieve your objectives. Measure your progress on a regular basis. Weekly checkpoints are preferred, but don’t do it any less frequently than monthly. As you do, you will find one of several things begin to come clear:

• You were right on target with everything defined in the 6 steps.
• What you thought was important to you suddenly seems less so (if you aren’t making time to meet your objectives, then it must not be as important to you as you thought).
• Your priorities are all wrong (or all right, or need some adjustments).

But the most important thing you will see is that you will achieve your objectives with amazing speed. It never ceases to astound me when I commit it to paper and repeatedly say it out loud, just how achievable something is.

As you go through this process, you will undoubtedly discover things about yourself and about the people that mean most to you. You will find yourself adjusting vision, mission, objectives, etc. accordingly. You may even find it is time to take a huge leap of faith. If so, it is wise to be scared, but it is ignorant to let that fear paralyze you to inaction. Rich discusses this in one of his online weekly strategy memos (see “Change or Die” at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOHL3-vFlJI).

During my first job out of college, I worked with a retired military paramedic who actually had to jump from a helicopter, locate and then hide with and care for a seriously injured fighter pilot in the jungles of Viet Nam for 3 days. Talk about a leap of faith.

His name was Larry and he always used to say, “If at first you don’t succeed, keep on sucking ‘til you do succeed.”

He used to say it a lot, so it really irritated me at the time. But 25 years later, I can appreciate what Larry was trying to say. During the times you fail or misstep, and you will, don’t beat yourself up over it and don’t point fingers. Simply learn from what went wrong and apply the lessons learned going forward. But don’t give up.

So what is the secret to success? There is no silver bullet. Success doesn’t happen to you. You create success. Anything you create can be considered art, so remember ART as an acronym standing for Articulate, Refine and Track.

If you articulate what success means to you and how you will achieve it, refine both your definition of success and your steps along the way, and track your progress, you will succeed in the vast majority of your endeavors, in much shorter timelines than you had ever imagined.

Best of luck in achieving whatever success means to you.