Success means different things to different people. Perhaps being successful means to you being a billionaire, or perhaps it means to you achieving your greatest goal or dream. In any case, no matter how you decide to define your vision of success.. there is one thing that, no matter how you view it doesn’t change the outcome. It’s not about what your goals are, or how you decide to achieve them.. but it’s about how you behave. Indeed, there is one thing that ALL SUCCESSFUL people have in common. Whether they be rich, famous, or having reached their goal.. there is ONE constant variable.
Guilty.. or innocent?
You’ve been working hard all week, from Monday to Sunday.. from 7am to 8pm.
You’re so exhausted, that the only thing you want to do when you go home is to sleep. You don’t even bother cooking, so you eat food already made.
What about cleaning the house?
Heh, you have no time for that.
In fact, more than the time, it’s especially the energy and the needed willpower that you don’t have.
You live from day to day, thinking that one day.. this will all end.
One day, you have a really important appointement. So important that you daily life greatly depends on the outcome of it.
The intermediary between you and the other company set the appointement one Tuesday, at 2pm. This week, it was your only day off.
Since you live pretty far from the place of the meeting, you need to leave at 9am and go by train.
After a few hours, you finally get there. It’s 1:50pm.
You enter the building, and look for the reception. You find a woman.
Then, you tell her that you have an appointement with someone.
“An appointement with him”? She asks.
You answer that, indeed, this is the date that had been settled on.
But she tells you that.. it can’t be. Because he’s on vacation.
You first think of a misunderstanding, so you explain once again the situation to her.
But she doesn’t waver; he’s unmistakably on vacation.
He wouldn’t have set up an appointement today, she says.
You’re devasted. After all, you’ve taken such a long trip just to come here. And it was such an important meeting. You just wasted one whole day that could have been use to rest.. all for nothing.
This must be a horrible feeling, right?
However, as horrible as it may be, this could have been avoided. Indeed, if you had thoroughly taken the necessary mesures by yourself.. you would have known. But you let this task to someone else. This person sure made a mistake, but so did you. The one of letting someone else taking care of everything instead of diligently doing it yourself.
From this, two types of reactions are possible.
Of course, no matter how you choose to react, doesn’t change the situation. But it can change your whole life.
Why?
Because it determines your success.
You see, most people here would quickly rage at the ”intermediary”. Of course, he’s the one to be blamed in the first place. But it doesn’t mean that you are blame-free neither.
After all, you allowed the mistake to happen.
Some people would rage, yell and cry on this unfortunate incident. They would blame the intermediary for being too lazy to diligently check the said person’s schedule and incompetent for letting such a mistake even happen, the receptionist for not knowing anything about it and the whole world for making them suffer.
They would blame everyone… but themselves.
Those are the people that will never be successful. Why? Because they don’t take any responsibility.
Taking responsiblity for a success sure is easy, and I’m willing to bet that everyone would do that. But what about the other way around? Would everyone take responsibility for a failure?
I don’t think so.
That’s why a lot of people struggle in their life. They simply do not take any responsibility, even if they were the very person to be blamed.
We could call that behavior, acting like a victim.
After all, “you’re always the target.” No matter what happens that doesn’t go in your direction.. is because of someone else’s fault.
I don’t know about you who’s reading this, but even if I’m the writer, it is kind of unbelievable to me. Why would people always blame others, when they truly are at fault? In fact, I can understand from the point of view of the ego.. it’s not so great to admit you’re in THIS situation because of YOU. In a sense, blaming others allows you to escape from the harsh truth and hence make you feel good about yourself. But is that truly healthy in the end? I ask you.
The thing is, not acknowledging your own mistakes will make you repeat them. Why? Because, if you don’t recognize a certain behavior or action is a mistake, you will keep doing it. After all, “it’s not a mistake”.. so why should you stop doing it?
Why successful people are successful?
Because they learned from their mistakes.
You can ask every millionaires on the planet and I’m sure that everyone one will agree that their trial and errors forged who they are.
Not making mistake.. is equivalent to not growing. If you’re not making any mistakes in your life, then you probably just don’t think of them as mistakes.
Let’s demonstrate that principle with an exemple:
This time, you’re reborn as a writer. Writing has always been your thing. You mainly write fictional stories. One day, you have this GREAT idea about a story that would be like this.. and that..
You’re not very experienced as a writer, but you just KNOW your story and writing are good enough to make you stand out from the crowd. So you go to a publishing company, and present them the said book. Long story short, the meeting ends with you frustated that they thought your “great book” was in fact PURE garbage. “Ignorants”, you think. So you go to another publishing company. You hand them over the book and… it ends up the same way. “People just don’t have taste”, you think. You keep trying to get your book published, go to every publishing company you can think of. For the sake of the story, let’s say you even use magic to travel to different countries and get your book translated in the local language.
Results: nope.
Your book is definetely cr*p.
But the story wouldn’t be interesting if you were to realize it, right? So you continue trying to get your book published.
Same thing. Again and again.
Do you want to know what’s wrong (besides your disproportionate ego)?
They’ve ALL been telling you that you needed to improve this and that.. but you didn’t take these critics into account.
From the VERY beginning, you were making mistakes. Your book wasn’t perfect. Far from it, in fact. You just didn’t want to admit it. By thinking that the others got it wrong, it make you feel like that you were right.. when you weren’t. That’s why you kept making the same mistakes.
Moral of the story: don’t look away from the truth. The truth is the truth, and you must face it so you don’t keep making the same mistakes over and over.
I know that it can be challenging sometimes, but it’s a necessary step for you to grow. I’ve never heard of a successful person that didn’t make mistakes. They failed a lot, and acknowledged their failures. Hiding the truth might make you feel good, but in the end, it hurts you more than anything else.
The next time you screw up BIG, just think about it: how do I make sure I don’t make the same mistake next time?
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