I was reminded last night that success doesn’t just come to you, and it might not necessarily be about hard work and attitude, like your Dad would always say.
Too often, we (the collective lot of us!) want to believe success is like the lotto. Too often we hope to get success that way – one day you don’t have success, then the next day success somehow miraculously finds you!
Sorry. It doesn’t usually work that way.
But one thing we overlook is how important success is to finding success. Here’s what I mean:
Directions for being successful
- Step 1: Find a little success.
- Step 2: Find another little success.
- Step 3: Find another little success.
- Step 4: Repeat steps 2 and 3 each day.
- Step 5: You are successful.
I know, directions are hard to follow for some people, so let me give you an example.
You feel like a failure at everything – job isn’t going well (or you don’t have one), relationships suck, you’re a little soft around the middle (i.e., fat) – basically you feel like a failure and nothing is going in the right direction. Guess what? When you wake up tomorrow you won’t magically be successful – no matter how hard you wish it, pray it, want it.
Start with small successes
You have to find some sort of success no matter how small. Maybe that success is eating one less Twinkie than you did the day before – yesterday I ate 8 Twinkies, today I only ate 7! Don’t let someone tell you that’s not a success, because tomorrow I’m only going to eat 6 and before you know it I’m going to kick this Twinkie habit!
This works with everything. Not recruiting enough candidates for your organization, can’t get anyone to pick up the phone and talk to you? Today, make one more call than you did yesterday – only one – and that is a success because tomorrow you’re going to do that again and call one more than the day before, continuing these small success steps until you’re just one big, giant bag full of success!
People who are successful and throw it in your face suck! They suck because they act like they’ve always been successful, but they haven’t. It came to them a little at a time, until they could no longer feel what failure felt like.
You see, success is like a drug – you need a little to want another hit, and it’s addictive. That’s why you need to feed your mind a little every day.
We can all find those little successes each day – the key is to find them every single day — and don’t miss.
Come see Tim Sackett speak on What Your CEO Wished HR Would Do at the TLNT Transform conference in Austin, TX Feb. 26-28, 2012. Click here for more information on attending this event.
This was originally published on Tim Sackett’s blog, The Tim Sackett Project.