Success can be baked with the following ingredients. If we need a million dollars or billion dollars to feel successful, then most of us would never get off the starting block. Here are my 10 rules of success. Coming up with our own rules leads to greater satisfaction as we have a series of targets to aim at.
Accept yourself unconditionally – In my opinion this is the first rule of any form of success. We must accept ourselves totally and unconditionally for the person we are. This is irrespective of other opinions of us. We must unequivocally accept ourselves and be totally comfortable in our own skin. We can totally admire all our wonderful qualities while striving to the best we can be with what we have.
Set your own goals – As it is often said goals are the fuel in the furnace of achievement. Every top person has a unique set of goals that they are committed to. However, the goals must be your own and it cannot be set by anyone else. Only you can know what you want your life stand for and what you want in terms of goals. You can set goals in your personal life, career, financial, hobbies, spiritual and impact.
Act daily – The actions we take daily determine where we end up finally. So even if we don’t take massive action daily we can still take some step forward every single day. Therefore, just taking 5 min at the end of each day to see if we made any progress is an excellent best practice. This is also the crux of the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. He says if you can’t exercise one hour just exercise for 10 min, read for 15 min and so on. Keep on building momentum towards building great habits.
Learn continuously – This is the game changing insight for the 21st Century. The amount of information available to all of us is mind boggling. Identify the experts in your field, connect with them, read their blogs, listen to their podcasts, read their books and finally document what you learn. Most of the knowledge is totally free of cost. We also must learn what to ignore.
Take care of your health – I know everybody’s health situation is different and the only person who can give you the best advice is your doctor. However, doing whatever we can with the situation we are in is the key to a more healthy and vibrant life. Barring any unforeseen health conditions, you can exercise a certain number of minutes weekly. The standard advice is to exercise 120 -150 minutes weekly. Aerobic exercise is the best to pump oxygen through your blood stream and if you do a little bit of weights that would be great. Yoga and meditation have also been proven methods to take care of our overall well-being.
Have a financial plan – Whatever is our earning potential we can still have a financial plan that works for our situation and family. Investing in individual stocks is not an astute way to go at least from most of my reading. However again a financial coach would be the best to answer the question. In general, the advice is to invest in an index fund which tracks the entire market.
Don’t compare with others – We can get inspired by others success, but we should never compare ourselves with anyone else in the world. Everyone is on their own journey and no one can know what individuals did specifically to reach their level. So, defining what success means to us personally is the key to a stress free and relaxed life. We can always get inspired and admire others success. However after that we should think about our biggest goal and go towards that.
Determine what gives you peace of mind – To me peace of mind is the most important ingredient of success. No amount of outer success will make us happy unless we are peaceful. Again, this requires some soul searching and a thorough understanding of what you want your life to stand for. This also means avoiding the things that disturb your peace of mind.
Everything happens for a reason – From my study of spiritual material I have come to learn a common thread running across all of them. The first is everything that must happen happened and the proof is it happened. You don’t need any other proof. The second thing is everything happens for a reason even though we will not know it until later. The true enlightenment which is very hard to reach is when you are going through something to realize that it has a deeper meaning, and everything will work out well in the end.
Never give up on yourself – If something is not working we should quit. However, as a person never quit on yourself. You are valuable irrespective of outcomes and once we realize that we can always move on to greater things. So, we should be totally sold out on ourselves to get the most out life.
There you have it my 10 ingredients of success. Coming up with your own will lead to greater satisfaction as well.
The views expressed here are my own and do not represent my organization.