I have often been asked about what one needs to do to achieve success in any given field. In this article, I will attempt to provide some insights from my personal experience and journey and I do hope you find them useful.

1. Decision

This is arguably the most important step you have to take, if you want to achieve anything meaningful in your career or business. Success begins the day to take a decision to move in a definition direction towards your goal. Often, I have asked some persons who come for advice what exactly they want to achieve? What type of job they are looking for? What type of car, house or goods do want to have? Most times I get the answer “anything” Just any job or car or whatever their goal is. The reality is anything means nothing.
So to succeed, you need to have clarity of purpose. You must have a clear mental picture of what it is you want to achieve in life. Like the popular saying goes “if you can’t see it, you can’t seize it”. If you are in that category, I want you to pause for a moment and ask yourself what you really want to get from life. It is also called definiteness of purpose.

2. Set Goals

Once you have decided what you want, you need to set clear goals. In goal setting, two key things are important. Number one is journaling. Most of the successful people I know or have listened to, always talk about the discipline of writing things down. I started this practice a few years ago and the result is amazing. When you write your goals, you can always look back and see the progress you are making and this will keep you motivated. Secondly, in setting goals you must place no limitation on your imagination. Just write everything whether you think you have what it takes to achieve it or not. Big goals, little goals, just put them all down. Then start working on the minor goals. In addition to this, ensure your goals are broken down into short term and future goals.

3. Take Daily Steps Towards Your Goal

We have all been given 24 hours in a day. Nobody gets more or less. What you do with your time, determines the outcome of your life. In the next 5 years you will definitely arrive, but the question is where? Jim Rohn puts it in a very unique way in one of his books. He says failure means errors in judgement repeated everyday, while success means good disciplines repeatedly everyday. So it is what you do every minute that culminates into hours and days and weeks and eventually years. Someone can take a harmful substance today and then say well I took it and nothing happened to me. What’s the big deal? If he continues in that self destructive habit for weeks, months and may be years , somewhere down the line, the effect will show up in ill health. It’s not the Capenter’s first hammer blow that brings down a wall or drives the nail into an object, but the repeated action of hammering.

Some people spend an average of 6 to 8 hours daily watching TV or doing unproductive things on social media, then tomorrow they wonder why their lives are not moving in a positive direction. As you go through the day, you need to take occasionally pauses and ask yourself ” how does what I am doing now contribute to my future goal?”

4. Become a Student of Personal Development

We live in a very competitive age. There’s a lot of competition for “limited” opportunities especially in the workplace. I have once gone for a job test during my early post-graduate days where we were told they needed just 40 candidates, but the number of applicants were over 3,000. Luckily, I made the list of the successful 40. For me, luck simply means when opportunity meets preparation. The key to beating competition is differentiation.

How are you differentiating yourself from the crowd? What makes you the preferred candidate? Some persons have left school over two, three, five or even ten years ago. What else have you done to develop yourself in your chosen field? How many courses have you taken to learn more about that field? How many books have you read? How many seminars have you attended? There are tons of free and affordable means of personal development online. How many of these resources do you take advantage of? We will explore this further in a different article. So you need discipline, you also need perhaps a mentor or coach to help in your personal development quest.

5. Faith

You will need a lot of self belief. Whether you think you can or cannot, either way you are correct. So believe in your God-given ability to succeed. Accept the fact that you have the right to excel. Don’t let anyone’s opinion of you limit you. You alone decide the limit you place on yourself. Only humans have the unique ability to grow, move, recreate themselves and achieve remarkable successes. If you don’t like where you are move you are not a tree.

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