What is Success?

What is Success? What does it take to achieve Academic and Life success? What are the rules for success? Delayed Gratification and Persistence are important Critical Success Factors.

Only your child can define Success for himself, even we shouldn't define it for him and certainly, don't let anyone else define it for him. There are some things money can't buy, not much, but they exist. ;-)

No one owes us a living, we have to earn success. The world is so vast and the possibilities are unlimited. There is a Chinese folk tale about a man whose son broke his leg. Bad thing, right? Until the army started a draft in his village and his son couldn't go off to fight because of his broken leg. Now the bad thing is the best thing that ever happened, his son's life had been saved because of the broken leg. Sometime bad things turn out to be serendipitous in the future.

Delayed Gratification

The MomsWisdom.net website tries to drive home a very important lesson - Hard work and Practice are essential for success. Foregoing gratification now and sacrificing for the future are difficult concepts to teach children. Everyone wants what they want not just now, but yesterday.

Motherhood is an exercise in sacrifice. Who wouldn't want to go shopping all the time and take lavish holidays to exotic countries? Imagine the amount of money you can save by not having kids.

Watch this Ted.com video by psychologist Philip Zimbardo on how happiness and success are rooted in a trait most of us disregard: the way we orient toward the past, present and future. This puts a perspective on our perception of time and its role in our success or failure. He suggests we calibrate our outlook on time as a first step to improving our lives. Philip Zimbardo was the leader of the notorious 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment -- and an expert witness at Abu Ghraib.

Persistence

'Nothing in this world can take the place of Persistence.

Talent will not; Nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent.

Genius will not; Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.

Education will not; The world is full of educated derelicts.

Persistence and Determination alone are omnipotent.

The slogan 'Press on' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race'

Calvin Coolidge, 1872-1933, 30th President of the United States

Success is do-able by most people, maybe not necessarily the first time, just keep trying until you find the right approach.

This Ted.com video on the 8 Secrets of Success by analyst Richard St John condenses years of interviews into an unmissable 3-minute slideshow on the real secrets of success. Richard St. John spent more than a decade researching the lessons of success and distilling them into 8 words, 3 minutes and one successful book.

And also remember something else, Success is a continuous journey. Here's the follow up video from Richard St John. I remember hearing about Oksana Baiul who won a Olympic gold medal in gymnastics way back in the 90's. Do you know what happened to her after that? Winning the Olympic gold medal was the pinnacle of her life, she became depressed after that and just didn't know what to do with herself at 16 years of age. Life is really a marathon... Setting continuous and bigger targets for yourself as you achieve your previous targets, is a healthy way to giving yourself something to look forward to. Every door that closes opens another. It is the beginning of the rest of your life. It is unpredictable, it is exciting!

Why do people fail?

No discussion on Success is complete without touching on the factors that cause people to fail. You see all these people around you. Always ask yourself what it is that makes some people such roaring successes and others such abject failures.

I touched on Controlled Failure through Sports to teach a child resilience. Nobody wins all the time, failure is a part of life. Put it to good use by learning from your mistakes.

Ken Evoy, President of Sitesell.com wrote an enlightening ebook 'Why People Fail'. Read it and see if you or your family have any of the 14 traits that increase your chances of failure in your endeavours. It is hard to face your own demons, but doing that is the first step in creating a better life for yourself and your family.

Where it counts in the game of life, when you fail once, analyse what went wrong. If you fail again, take a critical look at yourself, a pattern of failure is forming. If you fail a third time, the pattern of failure is there. Find out what is your flaw and overcome it. Blaming other people or the system is not a solution.

Sometimes mistakes and failures are necessary for learning the right way of doing things. What is important is the ability to overcome and learn from past failures. Doing the same wrong thing over and over would only lead to the same outcome.

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