The upside of being successful is obvious, you get to control your own destiny. All the work and effort that you put into your projects is yours. You will meet the most fantastic people. And if you choose to be successful in business – there is no limit to the amounts of money you can make.
Measuring success is achieving the goals that you set for yourself.
If you meet those goals – you are successful – if you don’t you have failed.
What is the downside of being successful?
Every successful person goes through stages before they reach true success.
And getting through those stages is the single greatest challenge.
You have your entire life to meet your goals. If your goals are small – then you will have a small life. If your goals are large – then you will have a large life.
The choice of your goals is absolutely yours.
Your goals don’t have to be financial – they can be about a life of contribution. They can be about being a great parent, child, cousin, or sibling. Your goals can be what ever you want them to be.
There are two types of skills needed to being successful for your goals. There are the technical skills and then there are the emotional skills you need to get through the stages.
Explaining the technical skills are the easiest. For a successful entrepreneur they include:
- Learning how to present in a way that meets your personality
- Learning how to write a sales letter
- Learning the Magic Profit Formula
- Learning the importance and the management of cash flow
- Learning how to market with direct mail
- Learning how to market with the internet
- Learning how to market with advertisements
- Learning to negotiate
- Learning to look after yourself
- Learning how to manage and work with people
- Learning how to create a vision that will encourage others to work with you
- And the list goes on and on.
The good thing about the above list of entrepreneurial skills is that all these are all “technical” skills. They can be learned or you can buy the services of people who have them. You just need to know that these skills exist. Many of the people and courses I recommend teach these skills. You need them as a beginning point.
You can make a list of “technical”the skills you need for any goal that you have set. Find a teacher, course, or expert and you are on your way.
The other set of skills that are needed are the emotional skills that can’t be “learned” but are acquired through meeting and beating challenges.
No matter what your measure of success will be. You will meet the largest single challenge of being successful. Let me describe how to recognize the largest challenge.
Something you are going to attempt will fail.
And the bigger the thing you are going to attempt – the bigger its going to fail.
But the failure of what you attempt is not the biggest challenge.
But before, I tell you the biggest challenge, let me paint a bleak picture of just some of the ways you goal will fail
- It will fail in a way you didn’t expect. It will go wrong in ways that you could not possibly have anticipated. But, when it goes wrong – you will say – I should have known that.
- It will probably go wrong because you upset somebody. Somebody that you may not have even known existed. This in spite of the fact you had good intentions but somebody somewhere misinterpreted your intentions. Or somebody had different expectations than you, or was jealous, or you effected them in a way you had no way of knowing.
- It will go wrong because you made a small mistake. The mistake will be small, something simple like a missing word in a sentence. Or ignoring a seemingly small event that grows out of control.
- It went wrong because you rushed. But you had to rush to get it done because you underestimated the work, or one of the thousands of details went wrong because of one the other problems.
- It will go wrong because somebody you trusted made a mistake. They missed a deadline or they made the typo or they forgot something. They made the same kind of mistake you made, with the same effect.
- Something totally unexpected happened at the wrong time. In this case, you were depending on something that always works. In fact, it was so stable you were so dependent on it – and you didn’t even realize what you were dependent on it.
- You didn’t have enough capital. time, or people. Most problems can be handled if there is enough of two of these three things. But, in most cases you never have all three.
- People will die at inconvenient times. This includes customers, family, or people related to people you are doing business with, or even strangers whose story effects you or somebody very personally. Death effects everybody and changes everything instantly.
- It didn’t go wrong – but it didn’t meet your goals. In this case – its just “feels” like a failure, but for the rest of the world it looked like a success, This situation happens because your expectations were to high, or you needed the success too much.
Everyone of these things has happened to all of us. And in fact in the last couple of weeks everyone of these things happen to me.
And why have these things happened to me?
Because I am trying to do lots and lots of things and therefore there were lots of opportunities for each of these things to happen.
If I didn’t try to do anything – nothing would have happened.
I will tell you – every single REALLY SUCCESSFUL person has had massive failures. The more successful you try to become – the greater the failures you will need to overcome.
Here are a handful of people who have been successful and have had to overcome massive failures before their goals were met.
- Donald Trump – In debt for 9.2 billion dollars
- Richard Branson – Almost bankrupt several times
- Thomas Alva Edison – deafness in one ear, no schooling, 10,000 experiments
- Richard Nixon – Fund scandal, Lost presidential elections, forced to resign, just a few of his challenges
- Franklin D. Roosevelt – polio
- Winston Churchill – Lost election, went against the grain
- Napoleon Hill – bankruptcy, divorce
- Nelson Mandela – jail, divorce
- Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt – 1st Wife and mother died on same day, lost presidential elections
- Abraham Lincoln – Many many lost elections, bad generals, assassination
The list goes on and on and I am sure you can add to the list of people and their massive failures.
In the case of Abraham Lincoln, he was dead for 140 years before his vision of equality was truly achieved. Barack Obama‘s run for President is clearly an achievement Abraham Lincoln can take credit for.
Each and everyone of these people had to overcome massive personal failures. And they did it.
To be successful, you need to look at a failure for what it is. Its a setback. A lesson to be learned.
So, after all this – what is the greatest challenge faced by somebody wanting to be successful?
My challenge is me.
Your challenge is you.
The challenge is waking up each day and overcoming the setbacks that everyone of us has and will continue to have.
Here is a quote from Teddy Roosevelt:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes [up] short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the greatest enthusiasms, the greatest devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumphs of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
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Zale,
Very nice article – it should motivate people in knowing those we have seen our lifetime go from horrible situations to making the most of their talents and becoming not only wealthy but vibrant contributors of our communities.
We should all feel blessed no matter how bad we think we have – take the bull by the horns – and as someone once told me – if you don’t like your story – then change it -