LifeLike it is

Indecisiveness and success

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A prelude to your New Year’s resolutions

All you need to know about success you learned in kindergarten. Right? Maybe… not. Kindergarten experience is not that widely shared. Many kids stayed at home with mom. Are they excluded from the future of success?

Is success a matter of luck or persistent doing of ordinary things? Success books outline things that we know (mostly); yet there are not as many successful people as this implies. Before I stray into a philosophical debate about success, I’d like to focus on a few basic observations why success is still so hard to achieve.

Success is a result of many actions. Noticed: “actions”? Although there are some peculiar situations where lack of action may result in a success, a rule is that we need to take an action to either succeed or fail. Failure rate is much bigger than success rate of all actions, but by increasing the number of perceived failures we also increase rate of possible successes.  How? Statistically, the absolute quantity of successes is higher with the larger number of tries. By simply adjusting your actions to lessons learned from failures, you improve your odds for achieving your desired results.

Now this does not work if the failures teach you to withdraw from trying again. Our brain is tricky this way. On an unconscious level it wires new connections all the time that tell you to fight or fly in any situation.  Contrary to popular belief, fight is not always what you need and fly is not always what you want. The good news is that if you wired yourself to no-action, due to past failures, you can wire your brain even more to learn new behaviour. Noticed: I didn’t say un-wire? You can’t un-wire bad connections that have  happened – you probably heard already the story about a pink elephant: When  someone tells you not to think now about a pink elephant, what do you envision first? Of course, a pink elephant. The same with your fear of failure. Saying or thinking “don’t fear” most often does not stop our fear.

There is no un-wiring until a pill to erase your past memories is approved for public use. No need to hold your breath until then though. New wiring is gradually pushing out the old, like newly learned things take the front row in your knowledge stack all the time.
There are plenty of methods to wire your brain with new positive connections: drop me a line for more info if you need it.

How is that almost all the self-help books which tell us what to do to succeed are not written by the most successful people? Because success takes more than knowing what to do, it takes more than visualizing where you want to be in 5 years.

All much talked about in 2010 Laws Of Attraction I perceive as merely tactics. It’s a good step in adjusting attitude, but not enough to achieve results.

So what does it take to succeed? Well, that depends who you ask. Abundance of films and books have been produced exploring different avenues of success.

Did you watch the “Yes Man”? We learn that just saying “Yes” to every opportunity can result in more successes than failures.

Did you watch “A Christmas Carol.”? We learn that learning from one’s mistakes can produce change needed to succeed.

Did you watch “My Fair Lady” based on Bernard Shaw‘s book “Pygmalion“? We learn that persistent work leads to great success.

Did you watch “Trading Places”? We learn that being in the right place at the right time, or pure luck as it’s otherwise called, puts you in the situation of instant success.

If this is so well researched subject then why we hear so often about famously successful people “…but what really got him/her a break was…” ? When it comes to think about it,  success has secret ingredient that is not so common to come by.

Before something amazing happens to change your life forever, here are 5 things you know already, to get you in the fast(er) lane to success in 2011:

  1. Want something that you will call success
  2. Outline the steps that you know are necessary to get it
  3. Dedicate daily time to doing it
  4. Allow new opportunities
  5. Say YES more than you are used to

19 Dec 2010

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