How Can I be Successful?
As I am getting older, having worked and travelled the world, meeting people from various cultures, having failed and got back up again, I have come up with my list of ingredients to be successful.
I am sure this is a question many of us ask ourselves, I still ask myself this question too. But through my experience, some of these things I will share below always ensure success in whatever situation. Here they are:
1. Never chase money
If your goal is purely money, you lose direction and in most times, your integrity. But if your goal is to become the best person in life, at work, in your industry, money will chase you. There is a saying, if you ask people for money, they will give you loose change. If you touch their hearts, they will give you their bank account. This is related to the next point.
2. Always start with why
People are naturally attracted to your ‘why’, because that is what sticks in people, and which is connected to people’s values. Try jumping a queue without explanation, and see how people will bark at you. Alternatively, try explaining to them why you need to jump, and chances are they will allow you. Similarly in business, when you establish a strong why, the market will open up to you, and your team will rally wholeheartedly behind you.
3. People are a better currency than money
Related to point 1 above, if you only chase money and ignore the people around you, you will live life alone, with lots of money but no one to spend it with. But if you invest in helping and building people, they will support you for the rest of your life, and your life is happier and meaningful. These people might also be the ones opening the gate to your next million dollars. In my work, I will always open doors for people, connecting them to other people, support them, write recommendations for them, mentor them etc, without asking for anything in return, because I know people are more important than money.
4. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder
This is an apt quote by Jalaludin Rumi, the famous philosopher. It just means, you are ultimately judged not by what you say, but by what you do. You probably encounter some people around you who talks a lot but deliver empty promises. These people will only last a short while. Those who stay are those who does the hard work and talk less.
5. Be an effective leader, not a coercive one
Some people think that being a leader means you need to know everything. If that’s the case, you will never have an effective team because you either recruit people less competent than you, or you will block their advancement. Being an effective leader is acknowledging that you don’t need to be better than everyone. You just need to be an enabler of people, allowing them to be better at what they do, and make them all work towards a common goal. And trust me, they won’t intimidate you, they will respect you more.
6. Grit
When we were kids, even now as an adult, we are told that people who have high IQs have a brighter future, and those without are doomed to fail or have menial jobs. But look around you. Who are the successful entrepreneurs? Chances are, they are not those clever people who score in exams. Most of them are school or college dropouts. So what is the predictor of success? It is something called grit. Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is stamina. Grit is sticking with your vision of the future, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make it become real. Grit is living life as a marathon, not a sprint.
7. Growth mindset
How do we build grit? The best way to build grit is to have a growth mindset. To understand what is growth mindset, we have to understand its opposite — the fixed mindset. A fixed mindset is when people believe their intelligence or talent is fixed. You either have it or you don’t. And when you have it, it will make you successful. If you don’t, you are doomed to failure for the rest of your lives. A growth mindset is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, that it can change with your effort. When we realise that our brain actually grows in response to challenge, we are most likely to persevere when faced with failure, because we don’t believe that failure is a permanent condition.
8. Failure is a precondition to success
I know this is hard to swallow. But you cannot succeed if you have not tasted failure, because your body system is not jolted to the point that it needs to move forward. We need to celebrate failures, be comfortable with it, and learn to get back up again and move on. Fall and get back up again. It is that cycle that makes us stronger every time. In the Quran, in Surah Al-Insyirah, Allah swt says twice in repetitive verses 5 and 6, “With every hardship comes ease”. How can we achieve ease or success, without going through pain or hardship? In these verses lies the ingredients to entrepreneurship.
“Sebelum ajal, jangan mati” — Hamka.
– by Fazil Irwan Som, Chief Executive Officer of MyBazar Malaysia
