Success is somewhat about being the best at what you do, although that’s not what it’s mostly about as other parameters also count, especially when you are working somewhere or when you have your own business to run. At work, for instance, doing your job well and beyond what’s expected from you isn’t enough. How you communicate, how well you relate to others at work, and many other qualities will matter.
When you are running a business, product or service quality is no doubt the most important aspect of your business. But there’s more – what’s your USP (unique selling proposition? How do you relate to your customers? What are your products based on – your big idea or the customers’ big problem? Life’s tough out there and here’s what you’ll need to be tough, undefeatable and to ensure the best life has to give you:
Whatever you do, go back to dirty work
You could be an executive working for a company or an experienced businessperson, but chances are that you aren’t tough yet. By ‘tough’, I mean that if trouble brews up or if anything unexpected happens, you’d wonder why. You’d suffer. You’d blow up your sanity. If you want to be tough, you won’t learn that in business schools. You’d have to get on the streets.
How do you do that with a job or business at hand? Make time for it. Get out on the streets and sell dictionaries, lemonade, hot dogs, or street food. Does it sound too radical? Well, not being tough or not able to fight life’s unexpected tantrums is just as radical. What were you thinking?
Be with tough, successful, hard-nosed, critical people
First things first, ‘critical’ doesn’t mean ‘negative’. Critical people are those who’d look down on whatever you do and have a tendency to throw it out of the window if it isn’t up to their standards. If an idea isn’t complete, they’d chuck it. If your analysis is below expectations, they’d scream at you.
They are your worst enemies and best friends at the same. More often than not, they are usually people close to you – be it family, relatives, friends, or colleagues. Leave the sissies in the world to team up with the other sissies. You need better.
Read and ‘internalize’ biographies or autobiographies
We all love stories. Bedtime stories, I am guessing, is out of your league already. Fiction is fantasy – a product of a writer’s imagination. That does you no good to motivate or inform; it simply entertains (consider this when you need an alternative for movies).
Non-fiction such as political accounts, tomes based on science and technology, or journals related to medicine would do you good if your profession or business has something to do with it. In most other cases, for almost everyone else who wants to gain something out of their time and effort, read autobiographies and biographies of famous people, successful, and really tough, “rags-to-riches” or accounts of “unknown-became-world famous”.
Nothing else would do.
Practice your craft
Are you a consultant? Do you provide services such as sales, web design, writing, accounting, finance, etc.? In spite of your experience, you’d still have a lot to learn. Go ahead and do it. Above all else, you’d need to be perfect in what you do but approach it while knowing that you never are. There’s no excuse to not doing what you claim to do professionally and get paid for it. Clients will never sit around to listen to your stories on how sloppy you got. Would they?
What are you going to do?