7 Ways to Learn from a Successful Person’s Achievements
What Makes a Person Successful?
What do you think of when you see successful people? Do you only see the results of their career success. Do you feel bad because you think you’re failing, since you’re not enjoying the same level of success?
We don’t have a pensieve like Harry Potter’s Albus Dumbledore, allowing us to look into the successful person’s earlier career stages. We don’t see how they toiled away as a lowly worker, struggling to move up the corporate ladder. We don’t see the successful entrepreneur’s previously failed ideas they had before their successful one finally took off. We don’t the see the barriers or self-doubt the successful person experienced that they had to overcome to reach their level of success.
How to Look at a Successful Person
What should we be thinking when we see a successful person? We should not compare ourselves to the successful person’s results. We should think through the successful person’s journey by asking questions like:
- How did they get there?
- How long did it take?
- What career stages or milestones did they have to master to achieve this level of success?
- What life stage are they at?
- What barriers did they most likely experience?
- What doubts did the most likely have?
- How did they learn from failures and disappointments to bounce back harder, faster, smarter?
Rather than feeling bad about ourselves, we much think about what made the person successful.
How to Become a Success Yourself
By not comparing ourselves to successful people’s results, we can avoid the feelings of inadequacy or failure. When we use our inner pensieve to think through how the successful person got to where they are, we learn how to become successful ourselves by learning:
- There are no shortcuts: we can’t speed our way to success, everyone pays their dues. Every stage is necessary so we can become wiser. Each lesson builds on previous lessons.
- If it looked easy, then it probably wasn’t: successful people make it look it easy because they learned from their mistakes and did not repeat them. Their cumulative knowledge from life and work experience make it look easy.
- Everyone pays a price for success: successful people are passionate, committed people who work long hours, work by their inner compass, and know what prices to pay for success.
- Career stages are important with logical milestones: career and life stages follow a natural progression. We can’t speed our way from newbie to master. We have to experience everything in between these two stages.
- Life stages are progressive: each life stage reflects different values and we have achieved different levels of success at each stage. When you’re in your 30s, it’s unrealistic to expect successes that people naturally enjoy in their late 40s or 50s.
- Failure and disappointment are natural occurrences on the path to success: They’re a constant companion that must be managed. We must coexist with them, but not let them take us over.
- Adversity makes us faster and smarter, preparing us for success: adversity are necessary lessons for success. The key is see it as an opportunity rather than a barrier.
- What doesn’t defeat us makes us more resilient and prepared for success: we must learn to master our emotions, realizing that failure, disappointment, any adversity is purposeful. It makes us more resilient, preparing us for success.
The next time you see a successful person and their amazing achievements, don’t notice only their results. Remember they probably had interesting paths to their career successes. They had their share of hardships and near defeats. They were just like us. We must be patient as we learn from our experiences and mistakes. We must remember that success is a journey, not a destination.
Updated: Added Success is a Venn Diagram
