How to Become Successful

Even though our schools have taught us for years in math, history and other subjects they did not spend a single minute in telling us how to become successful in life and a good human being in general. School is teaching us necessary facts but sometimes it is just useless knowledge when it comes to knowing how to be a successful person either in your personal life or in your professional life. The knowledge that allows you to become great in life and a great person.

Definition of success

Success can be defined by the accomplishments a person achieved throughout its life. Being successful, or to succeed means to have accomplished an aim and/or attained wealth. The dictionary describes success as an event that accomplishes the intended purpose.

How to become successful?

Question the things you were being told:

This remains an ability that school is failing to teach us to a large degree. Teachers rather prefer students that absorb all kind of knowledge without questioning and uncritically thinking. Think about your time in school. Have you been encouraged to question the things you were being told? I wasn’t. Let me explain this to you with an example: If the brothers Wright would have accepted what people told them (“mankind is not able to fly”), they would not have successfully invented one of the first airplanes.

Being successful does not mean to follow the masses and to accept every limitation the society is imposing upon us.

Living a successful life

Being a fortunate and favorable person means to question specific things and think outside the box. This is exactly the mindset you need to become a successful person.

Be creative:

When thinking about creativity people associate with that topic mostly artists, performer, and painters.  Therefore we should clarify that everybody can be creative, even without being an artist. Furthermore, creativity is a very special ability mostly of a successful person. A person that knows how to be successful in life is able to use its knowledge in a creative manner to solve specific problems. You can train your creativeness by trying to solve a problem without applying the “normal” solution. Try to find another solution that allows you to solve the problem in another, creative way. This simple exercise allows you to be able to solve tricky problems in a creative manner. Being creative is typically described as “thinking outside the box” – the ability to approach situations and problems from another point of view and find similar solutions that could solve the problem.

Express yourself clearly:

Knowing how to become successful in life means also to know exactly how to communicate your opinions and your visions to others. This is not only helpful to convince people about your dreams, but it is also essential when it comes to being a leader for your employees and other followers.

Learn from other top achievers:

Have you ever noticed that the presence of other successful people encouraged you to peak performance, whereas working with negative and pessimistic people were not really beneficial at all? It is exactly the same when trying to get to know how to become successful. Surround yourself with other top achievers that are highly-driven to adopt some of their powerful mindsets and other attitudes. They will also help you to increase your own performance. Being surrounded by other successful persons will also enable you to study their behaviors and make you realize their willpower to achieve goals and aims.

Show interest, gather information:

When I’m thinking about a good friend of mine who is a very victorious person I notice that he was interested in really a lot of activities and hobbies. Furthermore, he was able to add valuable information about all different kind of topics to a conversation. He knew that knowledge is powerful and therefore listened, studied and learned as much as he could about absolutely every topic.

The persistence to success:

A person that knows how to become successful never gives up and does whatever it takes to reach his targets. It is a necessary knowledge that most successful people didn’t become lucky overnight, but instead had to invest a lot of work and be persistent in order to achieve success. Being persistent means that you don’t give up after your first or second attempt didn’t work. Persistence comes also with a good mindset. Instead of telling yourself that you failed you could reframe this by saying yourself that you haven´t failed, but instead learned to avoid a similar mistake in the future.

Solve problems:

I want to explain this point with the example of the company Google:

• The founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have become utterly successful because they were solving a huge problem with their algorithm and search engine: the problem that it was very difficult to find websites that had the content the people were looking for at that moment.
  

But how can you adapt this to become successful? Be an open-minded person and look around to discover problems that a lot of people might be confronted with. Think about ways you could help them or even solve these problems in an effective way.

Be a real networker:

The advantages of being a very communicative and outgoing person are huge. Knowing a lot of people means also that you also have a great resource for advice and help. You simply have to get out and be open-minded. Don´t be shy to approach others, as they might be even thankful that you were the proactive person that made the first contact.

Finally, two of my most favorite Success Quotes:

Action is the foundational key to all success. ~ Pablo Picasso

I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody. ~ Bill Cosby

Photo by WoIfgang Staudt

In your opinion, what does it take to succeed in life?