Secret to Success

I just saw a very motivating clip on LinkedIn. In fact it was so amazing that I watched it twice. It really caught my attention. For years I longed to be a leader, but I could never get a break to exhibit my leadership traits. Then I resigned myself to being a follower. However I was not giving up so quickly. if was going to be a follower, I was going to be the best follower I could ever be. I was going to make a success out of following.

Secrets to Success

Over the years I gained more confidence, but I always made it clear I was not going to be a threat to the leader of anything I took part in. I learned and grew over the course of my life, but I always had a ceiling that bothered me. No matter how hard I tried to be a follower, I always longed to be a leader. My goal of making the world a better place because I had lived in it seemed unrealistic and far off, but I kept telling myself if I can follow well enough, I can make a difference. Turns out this was not so off the mark as it seems logically.

Leader-Follower Dynamic

Being a follower paid off in unexpected ways. I had the opportunity to learn from leaders who were successful at what they did. One surprising result was that I found myself (who else LOL) thinking over and over again:

“No matter how effective a leader is, their success is based on the followers they lead. After all they basically manage the followers and extract the potential and talent of the followers in order to achieve their success. While this is a skill in and of itself, it is the skill of the followers who get the job done”.

I wondered how people who lead justify their position and the credit they get. In addition how do they justify their salaries when it is us that are putting in a hard day’s work. This question bothered me, so I spoke it over with a great leader and my closest friend and mentor, my brother. He explained that as a leader he has to take responsibility and shoulder risk. Funds need to be raised and the people who invest are expecting high returns for their investment. As I observed him over the years, I saw how stressful this position can be to hold. To my delight I saw that, he too was putting in long hours and working hard.

Work Smarter, Not Harder

At some point he told me that working hard was all very well and good, but when you get to the maximum output and there is no more effort you can put in….It is then that you have to learn the best lesson ever, that is, to work smart and not hard. All these great insights and lessons learned aside, I still wondered why I was not making the difference I wanted to make. My goal was still unmet.

A Leader is Only as Good as the Followers

Watching a little girl being instructed to break a board brought home some really amazing insights. Credit to Oleg Vishnepolsky for posting this clip and captioning it, “3 Secrets of Leadership: Motivation, Inspiration, and Patience”. The teacher was trying to get her to break a board with her foot and she was too small to understand the instructions. After failing at breaking the board with her foot, the teacher took the girl by her hands. Then something almost magical happened, the child stood on the board, jumped up and landed on the board with her bottom. She successfully broke the board to the delight of her teacher and everyone else taking part in the lesson.

Yes, these are very important skills of a leader. Another important skill is active listening. Here is where I think there is still a great deal of improvement to be made in leaders of every type. This is what makes the difference between a good leader and a top leader.

While the clip showed the greatness of the teacher, the greatness of the learner outshone the teacher in the end. Everyone giggled and applauded the little girl who taught us all an amazing lesson. She reminded us that the leader is only successful if she breaks the board…and she did break the board in the most unconventional manner. This sparked my article because it was such a great demonstration of my thinking and highlighted the often overlooked fact that feedback from the follower can result in the most successful outcome which the leader could not have anticipated, nor come up with him- or herself. So here is my take on the leader-follower dynamic….

Defining the Goal: Knowing Where You are and Where You Want to be

You have to know what your goal is and then have a vision and passion to fulfill it. Once you know where you are going however, you have to know where you are at any given moment so that you can adjust in order to reach your destination. A vital part of this is rejection, failure, and making corrections based on feedback.

Feedback is by far the most valuable tool we have to reach our destination of success in any endeavor for many reasons. First we have to know where we are. If we do not know where we are, we cannot re-adjust anything that is not leading us to our goal. We have to constantly update ourselves on where we are in order to reach our destination. Having said that, it is very hard to stick to a goal. Our vision and passion has to be strong.

All of the above elements are important for success, but without discipline, persistence, determination, creativity, and practice a goal or resolution cannot be attained. Therefore I am going to focus on each one with some overlap to these and other elements of success I have already mentioned, among others. These skills are vital for great leaders, but maybe more so for great followers. I conciser these the secrets to success because they are what helps leaders and, more importantly, followers to stay in the game for the long term and reach and surpass their goals.

Discipline

The amount of discipline success entails is often overlooked. It is true that people who hold university degrees are held in high esteem, but what is their accomplishment. I remember all too well the number of university students who dropped out of courses and never got degrees in anything by the time I had finished my degree. The number one question I was asked in a few different formats is, “how are you still motivated to keep studying?” My answer remained, “I have my eye my goal and I keep reminding myself of why I want to do this in the first place”. It takes a lot of discipline to keep doing the same thing day-in and day-out before a person achieves a long term goal. Motivation and inspiration wane and monotony sets in. These are tough to overcome. However with enough passion and vision you can maintain the everyday discipline that is required.

Persistence

Another vital ingredient to success is persistence. If you fail, get up and try again. Persistence pays off. Sometimes we fail because we give up before we reach success. A great teacher, whose name eludes me, but message stands as strong as the impact it first made on me, once commented that he or she had a candidate in mind for a high-raking position. However before the teacher could higher the candidate, the candidate quit and gave up. It was amazing to me how close the candidate had been, but because he had failed in his own mind, he gave up right before he was about to offered the position. The teacher mentioned his or her regret at the candidates withdraw from the hiring process. What was most amazing was that this talented young man still had not been successful at getting a high-ranking position despite his abilities and skills. His lack of belief in himself to succeed lead to his lack of persistence and this was his downfall.

Determination

A great way to attain one’s goal is to be determined no matter what. Being obstinate has an up side after all (LOL). You have to make sure that your goal is well defined and worthwhile. Once you have set a mission statement, you are ready to develop the determination for reaching this goal. Sticking stubbornly to your goal when you come up against rejection, negativity, and constantly being told, “no, this goal is not possible to reach”. Warning: your goal has to be something that is going to make a positive impact on the world. This means the world is better off because you reached your goal and then surpassed it!

Creativity

Making the goal as tangible and real as possible in your imagination is a great way to cultivate success. Drawing the goal in as life-like manner as possible is crucial. This is because it stimulates your mind and imagination, which have vast resources such as creativity, to help you make this colorful, positive, inspiring goal a reality.

Creativity is not just about inspiring, motivating, and helping your brain come up with ideas. Most importantly as this girl demonstrated, it can lead to unexpected success and often better results than you thought were possible.

Practice

Practice makes perfect. This succinct statement expresses everything there is to know about practice in a concise manner. What ever you are doing takes practice.

At first you need to build a knowledge base and you need training, but after you get the initial hang of any work you are doing, and keep yourself updated with your chosen job, it is really about experience and practicing until you become highly skilled at your job.

It is ironic then, that discipline, persistence, and determination are vital to practice. The reason is that practice is a very hard thing to do. We have all experienced learning a new skill and giving up, or nearly, giving up before we have learned and mastered that skill. This is despite how much we wanted to achieve this goal when we started out.

In a different way, creativity is what might actually lead to the success or it might lead a person to continue to practice and reach the goal before giving up. What this means is that a person who is not succeeding at a certain skill might find a more creative manner of achieving the outcome or might make the practice more enjoyable through the use of creativity. For example, a person who is not fast enough to run a race might compete in the cycling event and win. In the second case I used challenge myself to learn what my mind had by then termed “boring” work for university exams. For instance, “how quickly can I learn all the steps in this process”? These simple, creative examples illustrate how we can “trick” ourselves into practicing and enjoying the process. They also illustrate how we can achieve success in a related, but more productive manner than we initially thought. This is where innovation often happens and great discoveries are made by otherwise ordinary, “unheard of” people who suddenly find themselves receiving awards or achieving greater success than they ever dreamed of.

Summary

There are lots of aspects to success and goal achievement. In addition to the ones I have mentioned there are others, such as time-management, networking, and attaining resources. However the 5 main secrets of success are discipline, persistence, determination, creativity, and practice. These are important for both leaders, but usually more so, for followers in order for both to achieve success in any endeavor. It is my heart-felt hope that this article will help you on your journey and bring you the success that enriches all our lives for the better.