There is no shortage of information available in books and online about how to be successful. Whatever it may be that you want to succeed in, whether it’s a career or personal aspiration, there are resources available to teach you about achieving success.
But I’ve been thinking more lately about what gets in the way of success – what you should completely avoid doing if you want to succeed. It’s much easier to allow ourselves to fall into those traps that prevent us from achieving greatness than it is to push through what’s holding us back. Sometimes these roadblocks are self-inflicted. Sometimes our environments or people in our lives are the perpetrators.
Regardless of the root cause, we’ll all come across barriers in the various paths we’ll take during our lives that cause us to lose momentum. Derived from my own personal experiences and what I’ve seen happen to others, here are five things to avoid:
1. Don’t consistently compare yourself to others. You are your own unique person, with your individualized talents, personality and characteristics. Sure, it may seem sexy to be that guy making tons of money and traveling around the world speaking. He’s viewed as a world-renowned expert, and people eat up every word he says. He’s a smart dude with street cred. You idolize him and wish you could achieve that level of success in your life.
But the grass isn’t always greener on the other side. Unless you know the people you admire and aspire to be like personally, you don’t truly know them. You have no clue what their day-to-day life is like. Maybe it is as glamorous as it seems. Maybe it’s not.
Don’t beat yourself up because you aren’t doing what they are doing. Be proud of what you are doing. I’ve been sucked into this trap more times than I’m proud to admit since I started my career. I look at what other people are doing, and I allow my proudest moments to become trivial. It’s a mental game. But if you’re ever going to succeed in life, you can’t waste any time wishing you were someone else. I still catch myself playing the comparison game every so often, but I’ve learned to not let it consume me the way it once did.
True story: A company built up a really solid reputation for itself. It seemed like this company had the perfect boss who treated his employees like gold. And these employees had the coolest job. I wanted to work there at one point. I considered applying there. But then a few of my friends got jobs there. And that’s when I saw a different side of that company and the boss. A very dark side. I thanked my lucky stars I never applied there, and I supported my friends as they struggled through a very difficult time in their careers. Like I said, the grass ain’t always greener.
2. Don’t be afraid to fail. Just writing the word fail makes me uncomfortable. We’re trained to avoid failure (Seth Godin has a great quote related to anxiety and failure). Parents and educators burn the “fear failure” mantra into our brains (OK, that’s a generalization, some parents and educators).
But in reality, failing is one of the best things that can happen to you – as long as you take away a lesson learned from every failure. Failure breeds success.
When you do fail, take the time to soak up that failure. Vividly live every moment of it, and figure out what happened that caused you to fail. Then turn it into a lesson. And teach that lesson to others so they hopefully avoid the same mistake.
3. Don’t treat success as a chess game, where you take each win (piece) and then immediately move on to your next move. Success isn’t a game. It’s not a race against your peers to see who can snag the most successes before your life is over. So don’t treat it that way. Relish in your successes. Savor those moments of victory. Just like you should spend time evaluating your failures, spend time enjoying your successes.
I’m not encouraging you to be boastful. Don’t fill up your Facebook page (or worse, your friend’s Facebook pages) bragging about how awesome you are. When your successes touch the lives of others, they’ll do the gloating for you. But don’t forget to give yourself the well-deserved pat on the back. It’s OK to feel good about your achievements. You’ve more than deserved it. And store those positive feelings away in a safe place that you can easily access when you’re having down-in-the dumps days.
4. Don’t bank on other people’s failures for your own success. Honestly, can you really feel good about success if it comes at the expense of someone else? We see this in the PR industry all too often. Bad news comes out about a company, and a competitor uses that as a stepping stone to get positive news for them. I’ve seen it done tactfully, when there is zero reference to the competitor’s fail, but the company simply steps up its PR efforts to remind consumers of who they are and what they do. But to blatantly call out a company or a person and use that to your advantage? Shady. You’re only doing damage to your own credibility. And you sure as heck aren’t getting closer to success.
5. Don’t follow. Lead. Just as you shouldn’t compare yourself to others, you also shouldn’t replicate other people’s success. It may work. But not for long. How long can you continue duplicating what someone else has done rather than forging your own path? You should absolutely learn from people who have succeeded, but you should take that education and find a way to apply it in your own way.
Think of all the companies and technologies that exist that are similar, yet distinctly different. What’s even better than duplicating someone else’s work is taking what they’ve done and making it better. That’s how you succeed. You find a way to improve something – to make it more valuable.
I could go on and on. But I want to know what you think. What do we need to avoid in order to find success? What have your individual experiences taught you?