Success means different things to different people, so it’s important for you to understand this as you begin to gain clarity around what this journey and what this outcome looks like to YOU. What are YOU willing to do to succeed? What goals do YOU have yourself? When do YOU want to achieve them? How are YOU adding fuel to the fire so that you can take all out massive action when it matters the most? These are all important questions you need to ask yourself, questions that you need to have crisp answers to. Think about it
I can decisively say that my life, my fitness, and my business turned around when I began to view success as my duty and my obligation, not only to myself, but to my family, my friends, and God. I was sick and tired of rationalizing my situation due to circumstances that were going on around me. “I have bad grades because there is a lot of drama going on in my life”. “I am sad all the time because my friends aren’t treating me well”. “I’m not getting jobs because the economy is doing poorly. It’s just not the right time”. Guess what? Everybody has to deal with drama, with unfortunate interactions with their friends, and with economic circumstances that are out of their control, on top of a slew of circumstances that I did not care to mention on my short list. And you know what else? A lot of the folks who are dealing with these circumstances are mental, emotional, spiritual, physical, financial, and familial successes. That means that you can be too, regardless of where you are, what you’ve done, and what you may or may not think that you are capable of achieving.
So, how can you change from a mindset of seeing success as a positive option to being a true duty? Crazy question, right? Well let me tell you what it looked like for me. I spent 16 years in an educational pipeline, attending the top academic institutions in the world, scouring through hundreds of textbooks, thousands of hours in the classroom, hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in tuition, yet not once was I ever taught the importance of success or what I needed to do in order to achieve it. My education around success came as a wake up call when one of my companies was put at serious risk due to an economic downturn in China. Industries, families, and even full economies were put at risk and it was all I heard about in the news. I then realized that I had exhibited complacency in my analyses and financial motions, and these complacencies put my business, my partners, and myself at tremendous risk. I quickly understood that success would be elemental in having a full life, and that my pursuit of success and progress should not be one of choice, but one of duty.
Now, you may or may not have had one of these wake up calls yet, but it is safe to say that most people approach success much in the same way that I did when I was less committed to my business. They view it as an option, something that someone else can capitalize on. Or maybe they are happy to just settle for “a little bit of success”, “enough success”. Treating success as an option is a surefire way to hinder one’s journey to create it. So live up to your full potential, ask yourself how close you truly are to your full capacity, and look at the pursuit of success (whatever that may look like to you) as a do or die mission. I’ll see you on the other side!