How To Be Successful: Ten Life Truths

Posted on November 3, 2015September 28, 2016 by Anubhav Srivastava

By Anubhav Srivastava ( Register for his Workshop – Build Super Confidence For Super Success!)

There is a lot of popular advice handed out by society on how to be successful, but then when you implement it you see it is not as true as people said it was. There are some things you learn from your mentors and then there are some things that you need to experience yourself before you come to a conclusion about their validity. Here are ten things that I learned from mentors and from my own experience which have been extremely valuable to me, when I wondered how to be successful So let’s begin with Ten Life Truths that you absolutely need to understand if you wish to learn how to be successful.

How to be Successful: Life Truth 1) Grades are not that important as society makes it seem.

Don’t get me wrong, if you plan to be a doctor, a chartered accountant, a lawyer or get into a company that only hires from the so called elite universities, then yes, grades are important. Otherwise if you really wonder how to be successful, what matters more in life is not your grades but your confidence, determination, networking skills, street smart attitude and the ability to keep pushing on for what you desire in life. You don’t need great grades for that but you do need the right attitude.

Most of the companies that have become successful( Ignore the ones where Venture Capitalists usually invest because they mostly have a bias towards companies started by students of elite universities) have had a founder who did not have the so called right pedigree but he still had the determination to succeed and learnt the street smart tactics of how to make things happen.

How to be Successful: Life Truth 2) It doesn’t matter what People Say

Some people are always going to have a problem with you. Whether you succeed or fail, they are always going to pass comments. Whether you are mediocre or excellent, you will always attract a group of people who will find something or the other to criticise you about. If you fail they will laugh at you, if you succeed they will get jealous and say you got lucky. So the point is when people won’t shut their mouth either way, why bother about what they say at all? What they say is not a reflection on you but a reflection on their own insecurities. Always remember that.

How to be Successful: Life Truth 3) Hard Work alone is not enough

We have always been told to work hard and results will follow. Not so. Any amount of hard work done in the wrong direction or done in the wrong way won’t yield much results. In fact it may do more harm than good. The problem is that for a lot of things you don’t even know you are doing things the wrong way before you are neck deep into them. That’s why educating yourself and getting a mentor is extremely important if you want to learn how to be successful and if you can’t find a mentor, then you will have to become your own teacher. Your biggest teachers are your own failures.

How to be Successful: Life Truth 4) Failure is your greatest teacher

Not everyone of us is lucky enough to have mentors so we need to become our own mentor. Ever seen how a scientist conducts experiments? He or she makes assumptions and then tests that hypotheses through experiments. More often than not those experiments are failures. But once that failure is done, the scientists records the results so that he or she knows what not to do the next time.

To be successful, you have to treat failure the same way. Test things, fail fast and make appropriate changes. The most important thing is to LEARN and become wiser and stronger. If you don’t learn you can have as many failures as you won’t but you will never get anywhere.

How to be Successful: Life Truth 5) 99 Percent of Your Fear is Fake

Yes, the brain loves playing games. Sometimes the brain becomes your biggest enemy. It tricks you into thinking that you should be scared of something because if you confront it will lead to something horrible. So how do you defeat the false messages of your own brain? You do so with your conscious brain. The conscious brain is you, the one that is reading this blog post right now fully aware of what is being said. The subconscious brain is the one that is sending you false fear messages. The only way to beat fear is for you to take the decision with your conscious brain to face the fear despite the nonsense the subconscious brain feeds you. If you can do it enough the fear will disappear and you will realize what you were fearing all your life was nothing more than a mirage or an illusion that was tricking you and stopping you from living your life to the fullest. If you want to want to know how to be successful, understand that facing your fears is one of the most important steps.

How to be Successful: Life Truth 6) Following Your Passion is TOUGH but it is worth it

People who are not following their passion think it is some kind of a miracle cure all for all the stress they are facing in life. The truth is that following your passion is tough as hell. Unless you are lucky to get things going your way quickly, you will have to be willing to endure months if not years of financial struggle with no guarantee of a reward, you have to be strong enough to deal with the judgements of society and your own self doubts.

Following your passion is not simple like those pictures on the internet make it seem, you know where there is a woman with her arms outstretched as if there is joy all around. The truth is it is a constant fight, a constant struggle, but if your dream is important enough then it is all going to be worth it. The question that will decide whether or not you will be successful at following your passion is this – How much pain are you willing to endure to get to do the thing you love the most?

How to be Successful: Life Truth 7) There are opportunities everywhere

We often complain about a lack of opportunities. The truth is there are opportunities in every situation, they may just not be the kind of opportunities you are used to or expect. Opportunities are close to infinite, you just need to have the awareness to spot what works great, just like close to infinite pieces of original music can be produced from a single musical instrument, you just need to have the creativity and awareness to spot what sounds great. Those who become successful know that the greatest opportunities are often those that nobody else sees as opportunities at first. That is why the returns in those kinds of opportunities are the highest. Because by the time others identify it as an opportunity you are way ahead of your competitors.

How to be Successful: Life Truth 8) The Journey is more important than the destination.

It is amazing how people think they are going to be happy or successful only when they achieve their dream, their destination. This kind of obsessively future centric approach takes away a really important part of your life, which is the present moment. Think about it, life really is a series of present moments and yet the irony is that most people in an obsessive pursuit for the future, forget to truly live and enjoy the present moment and then when the present moment becomes the past they obsessively regret about not having truly enjoyed their past!

The only destination we all truly share is the grave, please don’t postpone happiness until you get to that moment. To become truly successful, start finding joy in the journey. It maybe painful, it may not be as financially rewarding as you hoped, it may give you stress but there is always at least some joy you can extract out of life whether it is alone or with friends or whether it is in your work itself. If you cant find anything to be happy about right now, chances are you won’t find anything to be happy about even when you achieve your goal.

How to be Successful: Life Truth 9) You don’t have to be perfect

One of the major reasons for stress and unrealistic expectations is the idea that we need to be perfect. If you set up yourself for perfection you will fail, you will be disappointed and you will be burnt out.

In fact do you know that a lot of perfectionists do not start out at all! They feel that unless they do things perfectly, they are going to fail, but because there is no perfect way they don’t end up starting at all, or quit too soon, and as a result they fail by default. You don’t need to be perfect you just need to do your best.

How to be Successful: Life Truth 10) Nobody else can control your happiness

Eleanor Roosevelt said that nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent. That saying is incredibly true but we often forget it. We think that somehow whether we feel good or bad depends on whether others accept us. While hard to implement at times, this is going to be one of the crucial factors in determining your overall happiness level as well as whether or not you will be successful.

It is a fallacy to believe anyone else can make you feel bad about yourself. They cannot. They can only plant a negative suggestion in your mind and those suggestions themselves are meaningless. It is only when you consciously choose to accept what they said that those words begin to have any sort of power over you.” Nobody in the world can make you happy or sad, except yourself, for every feeling you experience involves the conscious reaction of your own mind to external situations

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The author of this article, Anubhav Srivastava is an author, motivational speaker and the director of Carve Your Destiny, a first of its kind inspirational documentary featuring some of the most famous personalities from diverse fields, who teach the viewers how they too can make all of their dreams come true. The movie itself has been seen on Youtube by close to 600,000 people. Anubhav has also been featured in numerous International and India Media outlets such as BBC , The Times of India, Hindustan Times, Rediff.com, Leicester Mercury and many others.

Email Anubhav Srivastava for coaching, consulting or motivational speaking queries at anubhav101@gmail.com.
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