Don’t Be so Naive
Succeeding at something great is difficult, and often complicated. If it weren’t, there would be a lot more people doing it. In fact, you would probably be doing it, rather than surfing for articles that guarantee that if you read them, you’ll succeed.
Just think of it this way: if success is really the result of one simple trick, that must mean that everyone else is either too stupid to read articles like the those, or too lazy to follow the “simple trick”. That seems a bit far-fetched, doesn’t it?
So here’s the simple trick you’ve been looking for to guarantee success: understand there is no one simple trick. There is no hack, there is no thing that Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and {insert name of eccentric entrepreneurial idol here} all did to gain success and fame. Once you begin to understand and accept that, perhaps you can get moving.
But, But, I read….
Yeah, I read Think and Grow Rich, and I read The Secret, and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and whatever Malcolm Gladwell book you want to heave out in cocktail conversation. Remember, those were written by people. Each person has a subjective viewpoint of reality, particular experiences, and try as they might, they can’t penetrate the veil of other people’s private experiences. So how can they know that their one secret is really the universal hack to prosperity? They can’t. They don’t. They mean well, and are undoubtedly trying to help, but if they get you to believe that it’s all that simple, they set you up for infinite frustration.
The fact is, each person has a different path to prosperity. The paths vary in complexity and difficulty. Some easily navigate to notoriety and riches; some scratch and claw, and eventually make it to seven figures and their name on a bestseller list. Some go to work from 9 to 5, drive home, and enjoy weekends with their family. Wait, what? What was that last one? Is that last person prosperous?
I don’t know, you tell me.
Who made you think that you have to be the next Steve Jobs to succeed? Probably Walter Isaacson. Allow me to blow your mind. You define what it means to succeed. This is unequivocally true because success is by definition to acheive some goal. A goal is something that is set or accepted by you. Therefore, you decide what it means to succeed. If you have set impossibly high goals, fail to acheive them, and are a miserable as a result, consider adjusting your goal, at least for now. If the goal was set externally by someone else, and your failure to achieve it keeps you up at night, you’re not off the hook — you accepted and internalized that goal. You can just as easily renegotiate that goal — if you are willing to work at that.
Just Keep at It
Other than the “one trick” I provided above, you can employ one other “hack” to success and prosperity. If you absolutely must keep an audacious goal for yourself, then make it one such that the extremely hard work needed to accomplish it is fulfilling in and of itself. This way, when you (inevitably) fail again and again to achieve your goal throughout your tenure of trying (as nearly everyone does), two things remain true:
- You got fulfillment out of the process of working toward your goal.
- You will also enjoy the work of picking up the pieces after failing, and trying all over again.
That, folks, is called future-proofing your goals. So if you’re attempting to begin a startup, only to sell it and move to the Bahamas and lounge in your hammock, at least make the company one you’d enjoy running even if it failed. The Hammock is not where the joy comes from, the work is.