If achieving success was easy, everyone would do it.
Fortunately, we can help! If you’re starting out in life, or perhaps trying to get it back on track, then we have seven things you can start doing today that will not only get you to achieve more success across all fields but also allow you to help yourself accomplish more than you ever dreamed possible!
These are practices that seem simple at first but have an onion effect going for them when it comes to the depth of their layers. They will help you change the narrative you set for yourself, which is actually pretty easy when you understand how! Let’s get working on the mindset as we go through the:
7 things you can do right now that will help you achieve success immediately:
- 1. Guard your tongue.
- 2. Don’t seek validation, create value!
- 3. Changing your story is the key to success
- 4. Gratitude is the cornerstone
- 5. Master your Past, Present & future
- 6. What gets measured, gets managed.
- 7. Control your thoughts
These 7 easy steps will transform you into an individual that is not only happier but more mindful and able to better navigate the ever-changing oceans that make up life. Now that you know what they are, let’s take a look at why they make such a difference!
Guarding your tongue.
This is the first and most important lesson to becoming successful,
Keeping your mouth shut!
Guarding the tongue shows a mastery of emotions. He who loses control of his emotions loses, period. This doesn’t simply mean in situations of anger, but also in jest or when tempted to boast. Words have a lot more power than we give credit for, and they have the ability to turn dreams into reality. An important lesson in life is that often the more we speak of our goals and dreams, the less likely we are to accomplish them.
There is a wise old saying :
Actions speak louder than words
and they
Speak even louder when we use fewer words!
There is an old anecdote from Loa Tzu’s Toa te ching which says Barking dogs don’t bite and in life, it’s a lot better to be the calm quiet dog sitting in the corner with the ability to bite, rather than the half-crazed one barking at nothing in particular behind a half-open gate, unwilling to take any action.
This is to say that often the loudest people in the room do nothing more than make the most noise.
Please don’t be those people, instead, focus on what you value and the actions you should take that will lead to your success. Think about the boy who cried wolf and how continuously lying and spouting hot air caused not only the contempt of his village but also led to them disregarding his words in his time of need. When for once he actually meant them…
This is a repeating scenario that you will encounter many times throughout your life, but the more you become aware of it, the less likely you are to get trapped by it, and the more results it will yield. By limiting the amount of “empty barks” you put out into the world and focusing on replacing them with well-selected and impactful insights, not only will your words have more effect, but people will value them more, which brings us to our next point:
Don’t seek validation, create value!
Every business that you see, from little corner stores, schools, banks, and hospitals to giant conglomerates, and even governments all fall under two basic categories, namely, products and services, sometimes a mix of both.
Irrespective of which they classify under, there is a universal commonality when it comes to their success or failure, namely the ability to create value for their customers. When you think about it, this is true for friendships and relationships as well. The more value you are able to create for others, the more you will in kind, be valued by them.
Keeping the above in mind, we come back to the first lesson of this section, which is not seeking validation, the great Marcus Aurelius said it best in his Meditations:
“We ought to do good to others as simply as a horse runs, or a bee makes honey, or a vine bears grapes season after season without thinking of the grapes it has borne.”
Adding another layer of insight to this, we can take a page from also late and great Alan Watts :
“You don’t announce the most extravagant going away party, when you are planning on skipping town to avoid your creditors the next day, you simply up and leave, preferably in the dark!”
In life, our creditors can be seen as those we seek attention and validation from, and while there is an exception to every rule and there exist a select few people and situations where seeking approval is worth your time and effort, you don’t announce it, you simply do it! We should all be trying our best to live a life filled with positive action and free from seeking attention or approval for it.
The message here is not to become an accommodating pushover, that only focuses on the needs of others, neglecting your own. Rather integrate the principles of creating value into your being, which in exchange will turn you into a vine that bares the sweetest of grapes and lead to achieving success and the mastery of life.
Changing your story is the key to success
One of the most powerful abilities we are gifted with is the ability to interpret and internally change the frame and narrative of any event that happens to us, a good illustration of this is Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning. Here he relates his experience as a holocaust survivor and teaches us that those who are able to attach meaning or purpose to their lives are able to survive and overcome even in the most harrowing of circumstances.
The ability to choose the narrative of our story dramatically influences the way it will develop and how it eventually ends. This allows some people to live their lives in a romantic comedy, while others drown in a myriad of tragedies in a life filled with “all the drama”. The biggest difference is not the events that have occurred, but the way the narrator tells the story, after all, life is a story that we tell to each other as well as ourselves.
This really is a more amazing gift than you may realize, one that can be used in many creative ways. Some good, some bad. What is important to realize is that you are the one writing the story. A final quote from one of the greats is the best way to cement the learnings from this lesson in place. Because this is literally a superpower, we will end this section with a shout-out to Uncle Ben from Spiderman :
“With great power, comes great responsibility”.
Changing your narrative is an incredibly powerful tool, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, determine the actions we take. This step is about ditching any habits or choices you make that cast a negative light on you and replacing it with a story where the main character is on his way to creating something amazing!
You are the one responsible for the thoughts you allow to govern your actions!
Make them good ones!
Gratitude – The cornerstone
A quick search on google will list a long range of benefits from, increased happiness, to better relationships. Yet still deeper than that, self-love and all the way to becoming a more resilient human being. Yet the real secret to its power is when you combine the previous section’s lesson and create your own narrative, where you set gratitude as the backdrop for your life.
Being thankful for what you have, eliminates the root of all evil, comparison. This will allow you, as the main character of your story, to detach yourself from focusing exclusively on the self and enable you to be more content with what you have in your life.
This also creates a much better story for your life that will in exchange cause people to naturally gravitate toward you. Being thankful for that which you have, but also that which comes your way alters the plot and makes living a healthy balanced life a lot easier. While there may still exist narcissism and other neurotic behaviors, your gratitude will start to correct them automatically allowing you effortlessly write a story filled with contentment and happiness.
By practicing gratitude, we are able to shift the intensity from personal woe and sorrow onto a happier narrative that makes us realize that at most these negative themes are only an act in the play and not the entirety of the story. Then we can kick back and appreciate what we have and who we have to share it with.
Incorporating gratitude into your life, the practice becomes seamless and in the long run, it will reward you many, many times over and become the cornerstone to achieving the success you want!
The past is your story. Your future is yet unwritten, the present, however, is your gift
You know as well as I, how much we love using the first half of a story to draw conclusions and make predictions on what happens next. Even though we end up getting it wrong most of the time. This is actually a good thing. If we are able to predict the ending straight from the start, it usually means that the story wasn’t that good in the first place. A wise person knows that life and the universe around us are the very best of storytellers, it’s simply up to us how we listen and interpret the lessons.
There is an old saying “we need to know where we are coming from, to know where we are going” and
There is a definite pragmatic benefit in learning from the past and preparing for the future. Most people spend their lives building dream castles, only to have them turn into clouds of ash in an instant when an event comes along that brings forth unplanned change and exceeds their expectations of reality. This by itself could be either positive or negative, depending on how the story ends, but usually at this point that we are so involved in the plot that we forget we’re in a story in the first place
When you think about it, nothing remains in stasis for very long and essentially life is movement, and everything from tides to seasons to relationships and even the tiniest atoms are always in a constant state of change, which makes it the only real constant in the world. What truly sets us apart the successful from the unsuccessful is our ability to adapt and deal with the constant changes occurring all around us.
When it comes to achieving success
Learn from the past, but do not let it bind or blind you
With the future, plan for it, but do not lose yourself in the ocean of endless possibilities
As for the present. Enjoy it, there’s a reason it’s called a gift, so appreciate it! It’s only in the now that we are able to act and incorporate the habits that will best allow us to react and steer ourselves towards the right shores in this ever-changing ocean.
What gets measured, gets managed. So decide what your “what” and wants are!
While there are some really good guidelines and existing methods by which we can gauge achieving success. It is important to remember that these were constructed by those who came before us and while there may be some really good goals and ideals worth striving towards, not all of them will be the right measuring stick for you.
As with the infinite possibilities held within the future, we can easily find ourselves caught in an interesting situation, where learning from our betters and making use of their experience is beneficial, but it’s important to remember that it can also be binding if it doesn’t lead us down the right path.
Culture tries to sell us an experience where it dictates success or failure based on a set of preconceived values carried out through our collective memory of history, but has there ever been an individual in this long record that has lived a perfect life? And if there was, did they see it that way while they were living it?
When it comes to achieving success there is no “one shoe fits all” solution and it can never really be pinned down to somebody else’s predefined experience. What is another trophy on the wall for the star athlete? Or material wealth to those in pursuit of enlightenment? There will always be a disparity between what is dictated to and expected from you when compared with what is right for you. It’s up to you to find a balance that works.
What is considered a success for one, could be the utter failure of another. Simply because of a difference in expectations and values. This is why it’s so important to determine the difference for yourself! Once you have some idea of that we can take a few pages from successful people and use their tried and proven methods to make our dreams a little easier to attain.
How to achieve your goals :
- Start off by defining your wants and goals. Writing them out is a good way to do this
- Then take on your definitions of success and failure according to your own standards, and nobody else’s, without this you have no way to track your progress or even know when you hit your goals. It’s not possible to strive for achieving success if you don’t know what it means for you.
- Revisit your list multiple times a day, having defined success and failure, we should also be aware that that list will change many times over the course of our lives, which is why we need to record, revise, manage and measure.
- Don’t share them with others, unless absolutely necessary! As discussed earlier, speaking too much dilutes potency, the closer we keep our dreams and goals to our heart, the more likely they are to be realized.
If you would like to work on improving your goal setting, we have a fantastic pillar post on Setting goals that dives into the topic and provides you with all the techniques you’ll need and how to apply them!
7. Control your thoughts
The final secret I have to share today makes the claim to be the highest secret of certain religious organizations, as well as some more occult ones, neither of which will be brought into this article, as they really aren’t relevant here, their secret, however, is.
To put this into a frame where it will make sense, we need to take into consideration that our entire body and all of its intricate systems are governed by the firing of little electrical impulses between neurons that relay the sensory information we interpret as reality into our brains. With this in mind :
”Reality is to thought, what ice is to water “
This either makes complete sense to you or perhaps it is something that still needs pondering, however when you think of things at an atomic level, everything is a form of stored energy. There is an incredible truth contained within that. We are small, individual representations of a great flame, while still being the great flame itself. Meaning that we can borrow the power from this greater flame and put it towards achieving success in our everyday life.
The longer you are able to keep your thoughts focused on an idea or goal, the more likely you are to realize it!
In a sense, we are basically little wishing machines. Except that just like turning water into ice, it requires certain factors to be in place. Starting with an environment where the conditions are right. Just as water usually takes a bit of time to move to a frozen state. Your thought can be seen as a dart traveling toward your dreams. However, unlike a dart that will stay its course once launched, we need to channel our focus and keep our eyes on the prize if we hope to hit our targets
Basically, you are the universe and the universe is you. Just that there is some lag which we call life, and if we want to be successful at achieving our dreams we need to stay focussed.
This world and the experience we get to have in it is truly magical
Not the parlor kind either, we’re talking about the good stuff we believed in as children, and in the true spirit of magic, these seven secrets are more than words. They can become a path to follow and a set of practical tools to carve out what you need. Have the ability to prevent many of life’s pitfalls and better prepare you for the unavoidable ones. This will grant you wisdom above that of your peers, and enable you to escape the traps of life’s circumstances. While also allowing you to achieve success and live a value-filled life truly worth living. The type filled with many great relationships, completed goals, and happy dreams!
As a final thought, whenever possible. Be patient, gentle, and kind…then just Be – for you are the other I.
Be sure to check out our other life-changing articles for more great posts like this or head over to our library and self-development section for the type of books that will make an incredible difference in your life!
TLAT is reader-supported, when you buy through the links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Learn More
