The Success Criteria: Have You Got What it Takes?

A few years ago I thought that I had figured out the key to my existence. I believed that I had cracked what so many others have either ignored or forgotten. We can do anything we want in this world. The process is the important part, the hard work is the crucial key to achieving whatever your dreams may be. That’s all it takes, the secret ingredient to Steve Jobs’ success, Richard Branson’s success, among many others, is hard work. You can argue that seizing all of your opportunities or accessing the brains of the smart people around you are more important but I believe that the key to success is hard work. There is a catch though, as with most great things, you need to be the right person or willing to change yourself to be the right person. If everyone knew our little secret, we’d all be millionaires. Right?

When I first figured out that a little hard work was all that was needed to being the next Pelle or William Shakespeare I wondered why more people weren’t successful. As time has gone by I have realised a few different answers; firstly, people are stupid. So many people allow themselves to be distracted from their hard work by meaningless things like celebrities. They are too busy worrying about Brad and Angelina to focus on their own lives. We don’t need to worry about them. Other people don’t think they need to work hard and can just coast along without causing too much stress. Don’t need to worry about them. Others never even realise that a bit of hard work is the secret ingredient. They are not worth the worry. Some people are scared of working hard, too lazy to work hard or allow procrastination to take over. This is the majority. Then there’s those that just don’t know what hard work is. There is hope for those last two groups, this is where you need to change yourself though. The idea of working hard does not sound that bad. It’s two words and takes about 2–3 seconds to type on a keyboard. Unfortunately, it’s never that easy. Realising the key to success is one thing, you’ve actually got to be prepared to put every single ounce of energy you have into whatever it is your doing to actually turn the key. When I was studying for my final school exams I would watch countless motivational videos on YouTube. My favorite ones were those by Eric Thomas. If you haven’t heard of him he is a motivational speaker who really pushes the need for hard work, one of his more famous quotes that has always stuck with me is; “When you want to succeed more than you want to breath, then you will be successful” He used an asthma attack as an example, when you want to succeed such as when you’re having an asthma attack and want to breathe, then you will be successful. It sounds crazy to compare the struggle for life to wanting to succeed but that’s exactly what it is; a struggle for your life, for your future. It is easy to underestimate the actual gravity of hard work, it isn’t just spending a few hours a day working, it’s day in, day out doing all you can to achieve your goal. It’s getting up early and going to bed late. It’s saying no to your friends when they want to go out because you need to stay at home and work. It’s realising and accepting that who you are when you start working hard won’t be the same person who finishes, but that’s a good thing.

For a long time I thought that the idea of success meant fame. However, today the idea of success to me is that when I am dead and buried I will be remembered by a lot of people. Equally, when I am on my death bed I want to be able to look back on my life with pride and no regrets. My mentality blocks me from thinking that success can be achieved without fame and money. I recently spent some time on a farm in Estonia with some of the most incredible people I have ever met. I stayed with a family of 5 (soon to be 6) Estonians who had moved to the farm about a year and a half ago. The parents had met at university and knew what they wanted was a family. So, they worked hard got their degrees and after years of hard work they moved to this amazing part of the world. These people were some of the happiest people I have ever met. They had their daily challenges but they overcame them and moved on and at the end of the day, they were happy. This woke me up in that I began to realise that possibly success doesn’t always have to correlate with fame. I’d never really thought about it but I started to wonder about all the people in the world who are just working hard and we don’t hear about them. The teacher who is spending long nights writing lesson plans or reports, the garbage collector working at the crack of dawn, or the writer who refuses to give up when so many have told them to stop. There are countless numbers of people who deserve success yet we’re too convinced that only the famous are successful. I know one or two people who work harder than a lot of celebrities so why should we celebrate a pumped up teen who made a cheesy song rather than someone who has spent their entire life working hard? That doesn’t sound fair to me.

Let’s recap for a second. You’re telling me that all I need to do is work hard and things will be great? So what’s with poverty? Homelessness? Disease? Those people didn’t work hard enough? I’ve heard stories of people in Africa walking miles and miles just to get clean drinking water for their family and then walking back again with this huge jug of water on their head. That sounds like hard work to me. So what do they get in return? Of course, there are people in poverty who have worked hard and achieved atmospheric success. But what about the other 3 billion people in this world living under $2.50 a day? If you believe the criteria of success, then they must’ve failed. They mustn’t of done a hard days work in their life. This obviously cannot be true so there must be something wrong.

I think that it is important to work hard in things you do in life, it does provide plenty of rewards. However, success is individual to each and every one of us, it differs from human to human and context to context. My vision of success is very different to what someone in poverty would vision. This is important to remember. If you think that there is something wrong with the success formula then I’m not sure I would agree with you. However, if you think that the formula is bias then I would agree with that. Don’t get lulled into believing that the only reward for success is wealth and fame, if you work hard then look around you and the rewards will show themselves.

Thank you for reading.