A Random Thought on Success

Success is something I’ve always wondered about.

What is it? Why do some people have it, and others don’t? What is the recipe for sucess?

To answer all these question, I spend a lot of time thinking about it, and I try to understand what helps on being more successful, and what small things people do that makes them walk just a little bit more on their path of success.

As Winston Churchill once supposedly said, “Success isn’t final and failure isn’t fatal”. Meaning that a person doesn’t reach success. One either is or isn’t successful every day in whatever they pursue. Failing or succeeding in any given day doesn’t mean that will be the result from that moment on. Everything may always change for better or worse.

Many authors and thinkers try to dissect successful people and try to find the core of what makes them so.

One thing that authors seem to consider mandatory as the first thing to be successful is to have a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset.

In a growth mindset people believe they can improve. In a fixed mindset, people believe they are either born with the talent or not.

I think it goes without saying that if you don’t believe that you can get better, then you won’t even try. So, it is absolutely necessary to believe our habilities can be improved in any way, in order to achieve our goals.

Still, just believing we can improve isn’t enough to reach all our goals.

Once I read a book by Malcom Gladwell, called Outliers. In this book, the author basically said that practice makes perfect. And sucess is something that comes with it.

According to Gladwell, people spend the so called “10 000 hours practicing” something, then they mastered that thing to a point of almost perfection, and so, they could become successful.

But Angela Duckworth in her book, Grit, states that it isn’t just practice that makes perfect. It is deliberate practice. Deliberate practice basically means, to keep going at hard challenges, so that we always feel we aren’t having it easy.

If we get to a point, when we do something, but it doesn’t challenge us, then we stay the same. Basically, when we keep ourselves doing something in a comfortable way, then we don’t get better at it. This is why simply doing something for 10 000 hours isn’t enough.

To get better is to permanently go a little bit out of the comfort zone, and that is hard. Really hard.

I personally agree with Angela Duckworth more. I do believe that we have to put ourselves permanently into harder challenges for our habilities to improve. And only that way can we truly become exceptional in whatever we set ourselves into.

Reading the book Grit, by Angela Duckworth, we also find out that gritty people have more chances of success than non-gritty people. And what is a gritty person, you might ask? Well, as the author states, grit is a combination of passion and perseverance.

Passion for what we do, and the will to not give up at it.

That’s the reason why, usually only gritty people are successful. Because to keep going out of the comfort zone permanently, in order to get better, requires, first, passion for what we do, and second, perseverance.

1- Passion, because it is really hard to keep doing something like this, when we don’t like what we do.

2- Perseverance, because many times we will fail, and by persevering, we understand that we just need to keep trying, and eventually, we will reach our goal.

One example of perseverance is the famous quote about Thomas Edison, that is now told in many ways, saying that he wouldn’t acknowledge he failed 1000 times when trying to make the lightbulb, he just found 1000 ways that can cause failure.

I think this is something a gritty person would say and do. Just keep trying.

Of course, all this being said, having a growth mindset, grit, and pursuing a deliberate practice, may not be enough to be succesful.

A person also needs to be smart on how to use the grit. A person who simply never gives up at anything, may just be missing out on things they would like to do more.

And some people just may not be lucky enough to meet the right people at the right times. Or simply there may just be even more variables to success than we imagine.

I am sure though, that by believing we can improve, by being passionate about what we do, by being stubborn in not giving up when things get hard, and by always trying to find harder challenges in order to improve our habilities, then our chances of success improve exponentially.

The first question I asked is possibly the hardest to answer though. What is sucess?

Well, I guess this depends on who you ask.

I think there isn’t a need to be world famous, or rich to be sucessful. It just depends on what goals you have.

For me, to be successful is as simple as, to reach our goals. No matter what they are. No matter how big or small they may seem.

For some people the goal is to create a huge company that dominates markets. For others is to raise a healthy child that becomes a good person. For others it might be to try to help out a few people who need help. And for others it may be to be able to have a home, or even have food in their table every night.

Every single of these things are as important as anything else.

Humanity is a collection of all these things, so everything matters. All we can or should do is to try to be the best version of our true selves. Which means following our passions and just not give up at them. Even though sometimes we may need to take detours to get there.

Best thing about this is, you can do it, if you really out your mind at it and play the long game, because life isn’t a sprint, it is a marathon. And every little step you take in this marathon counts. What you do today counts, after all, life is just today multiplied. So take the steps in the right direction, no matter how small they are.