Avoiding Mistakes?

 

No matter what you want to succeed at in life—your career, a hobby, your personal life—there are a few universal truths that can be applied to the pursuit of success, and a few mistakes that can be considered universal barriers to achieving it. As I’ve watched and studied successful people in my life, I’ve noticed five mistakes that they seem to be able to avoid at any cost. Do you fall into the trap of any of these mistakes? If so, you may be putting roadblocks on your own path to success

MISTAKE 1: AVOIDING RESPONSIBILITY

“The price of greatness is responsibility.” – Winston Churchill

One of the first things you will notice that successful people don’t have is a blaming or victim mentality. When things go wrong, what is your first response? Successful people won’t say, “I couldn’t succeed because of X, Y, and Z” or “It’s actually this person’s fault.” They’re much more likely to own a mistake rather than blame others for their failure or misfortune. I believe the key here is that by owning a mistake, we are more likely to learn from it and much less likely to repeat it.

MISTAKE 2: PROCRASTINATE

"Procrastination is the bad habit of putting off until the day after tomorrow what should have been done the day before yesterday." - Napoleon Hill

Successful people tend to take action, regardless of whether it is the “perfect” time or not. When Gutenberg invented the printing press, the literacy rate was almost nonexistent—not exactly perfect market conditions for mass producing books. And no one knew they needed a “smart” phone until Apple invented one. Don’t wait for the perfect time to do something. Work hard and don’t give up—regardless of what might be going on around you. Success is very often the accumulation of many small achievements over a long period of time.

MISTAKE 3: FOLLOW THE TRENDS

“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion”. –Jack Kerouac

Every day we produce 2.5 quintillion (1018) bytes of data. In that flood of information, it’s tempting to think that we have to jump at every new development, try every new thing. (We sometimes call it “shiny object syndrome.”) But jumping at every new thing will leave no time to develop the deep understanding that pursuing lifelong learning might. Focus your energies on understanding the root of what you hope to succeed at and ignore the rest. For example, if you hope to succeed in sales or marketing you might choose to study human psychology rather than the latest social media marketing schemes.

MISTAKE 4: TRY TO GO IT ALONE

“Life is not a solo act. It's a huge collaboration, and we all need to assemble around us the people who care about us and support us.” – Tim Gunn

One of the most vital things successful people do is to surround themselves with other successful people. No man is an island, and having a network, a mastermind group, surround oneself with clever people can make all the difference between success and failure. This is true whether you hope to succeed at a personal goal like weight loss (studies show people lose more weight in a group than alone) or a business goal.

MISTAKE 5: LACK OF BELIEF

“Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.” – Norman Vincent Peale

This isn’t about positive affirmations or visualizing success, but rather, as Peale says, “a humble but reasonable confidence” that you can achieve what you set out to achieve. Think about it the other way round if you are skeptical; if you don’t believe that you can succeed, why would you even try? You must cultivate a strong belief in yourself even in the face of setbacks or adversities if you hope to ultimately be successful.

Avoiding these mistakes will help you succeed at work or a single goal or task, but to be truly successful, we also need to be happy. The sixth mistake I see unsuccessful people make is not seeking a health balance between work that fulfills, family life, friends, and health. Only when you make happiness and balance a goal can you truly succeed in any other area of your life.

How have you avoided making these mistakes? Please share your success and wisdom with us in the comments below.

@kipsmiln

MISTAKES OR STEPPING STONES?

 

Well, we all want to be successful, right? Success is most commonly understood as making a lot of money or having a stellar career in business, sports or entertainment. However, success can equally mean being successful at a hobby or learning a new skill, successfully raising great children, being a wonderful spouse, successfully fighting a disease or caring for and supporting others. Success is whatever you want it to be. You define what it is you would like to succeed in.

No matter whether you want to be successful in your career, or in anything else, there is one thing you should always do: Make mistakes and learn from them!

I stumbled upon a post sometime ago 'The One Thing Successful People Never Do', that talks about the importance of perseverance in pursuing dreams and not giving up. It provided many examples of how successful people including Walt Disney, Bill Gates, J.K. Rowling and Steve Jobs failed along their way to success. Many of them failed numerous times before they became successful. For example, Henry Ford went bankrupt with his first attempt to build a car, got sacked from his second venture, before he finally made it in his third attempt. Another example is serial-entrepreneur Richard Branson who has a massive array of failed business ventures to his name including Virgin Cola, Virgin Vie, Virgin Clothes, Virgin Cars, Virgin Brides, Virgin Flowers, among others. What Branson shows is that he never gave up on his overall dream but that he was (and still is) able to admit mistakes (quit the ventures that don't work) and take away lessons that will make any future ventures more likely to succeed.

Let’s look at the importance of learning from mistakes in a little more detail. We as society usually view mistakes as negative. We are often fearful of making and admitting mistakes because it makes us look weak, vulnerable or stupid. Instead, we should see mistakes as one of the most important stepping-stones to success! Making mistakes should be seen as something positive because it often means we have tried something new or difficult, but didn’t get it quite right the first time round. Oprah Winfrey got fired from a TV job in her early career because she was seen as ‘unfit for television’ and Walt Disney got fired for ‘not being creative enough’! They had a choice: Give up on their pursuit of success or persevere and learn from their mistakes.

But even more fundamentally: mistakes help us learn anything.

Without mistakes there would be no progress and no success. We all know that when babies first learn to walk they will fall over many times and make many missteps. Learning from these experiences helps them to eventually balance properly and walk. We all make mistakes, some bigger and some smaller, and they help us to learn. The problem is that we often put ourselves down for making mistakes. We feel stupid and embarrassed, especially when the mistakes were big. However, the bigger our mistakes the more memorable they are for us, which in turn means that the learning from them is also bigger. I am sure you are like me and remember many embarrassing mistakes we have made throughout life and because they were embarrassing we will always remember them vividly. This also means that they have taught us memorable lessons that will prevent us from making the same or similar mistakes again.

I believe that we have to change our attitudes to mistakes so that mistakes become something we no longer are ashamed of. Instead, we should encourage people to make mistakes and admit mistakes. Especially in business we seem to view mistakes as something very negative. Companies want to see clean-cut CVs that don’t mention any mistakes or missteps and bosses often punish or ridicule employees for making or admitting mistakes. I like and respect people that show they have made mistakes. It tells me that they have tried and hopefully taken away valuable lessons that ensure they never make the same mistake again.

In my day to day endeavors, I see many different leadership styles. I have to say that the best leaders are those that allow employees to make mistakes. They take away the fear of admitting mistakes and instead give people support so they can take risks and learn from mistakes. I find out that the same also applies to good coaches, good parents, good teachers, etc. They all understand that everyone makes mistakes and that it is best to create an environment in which it is safe to make and admit them.

Of course, it is not acceptable to make the same mistakes all over. Successful people are not afraid of making mistakes but they don’t make the same mistake twice. Take Thomas Edison’s attitude to mistakes during his quest to develop the light bulb: “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”. It is exactly this attitude and his ability to learn from mistakes that enabled him to eventually succeed. Edison also said “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

So the overall lessons here are: Be comfortable making mistakes in your pursuit of success. Don’t be ashamed or put yourself down for making mistakes, but be sure you learn from them and you don't repeat them! And, of course, never give up pursuing your dream (even if it means changing direction a few times along the way)!

@kipsmiln

Wise Sayings To MOTIVATE You

Be careful reading these quotes, they might just inspire you to do things you dreamed of doing, they might help you succeed and might even make you happier.

"All our dreams can come true - if we have the courage to pursue them" - Walt Disney

"Your time is limited; don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinion drowned your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary." - Steve Jobs

"Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresea, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein." - H. Jackson Brown Jr.

"Fear less, hope more, eat less, chew more, whine less, breathe more, talk less, say more, hate less, love more, and good things will be yours." - Swedish Proverb

“Accept responsibility for your life. Know that it is you who will get you where you want to go, no one else.” - Les Brown

"When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us." - Helen Keller

"Happiness is not something you postpone for the future; it is something you design for the present." - Jim Rohn

"Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude." - Thomas Jefferson

"The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack in will." - Vince Lombardi

"It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed." - Theodore Roosevelt

"Success does not consist in never making blunders, but in never making the same one a second time." - Josh Billings

“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” - Michael Jordan

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” - Wayne Gretzky

“In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.” - Bill Cosby

"It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult." - Seneca

"It is only the very wisest and the very stupidest who cannot change." - Confucius

"Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit." - Aristotle

"Vision without action is daydream. Action without vision is nightmare." - Japanese Proverb

"A goal is a dream with a deadline." - Napoleon Hill

"Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another." - John Dewey

“Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs.” - Farrah Gray

“There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them.” - Denis Waitley

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” - Lao Tzu

“Good things come to those who wait… greater things come to those who get off their ass and do anything to make it happen.” - Kip Smiln'

“Life is short, live it. Love is rare, grab it. Anger is bad, dump it. Fear is awful, face it. Memories are sweet, cherish it.” - Kip Smiln'

@kipsmiln