Keys To Success

You hear so many motivating speeches pumping you up for success, telling us to rise up and do what you have been called to do. However, if you don’t know what you've been called to do, then is it motivating or does it resonate how much you're still lacking and add to your confusion? You are your own worst critic and your biggest fan. You must find a way to motivate and encourage yourself. There will be days when no one is able to do it for you. When someone has “a word for you ", and its incongruous or inappropriate, it is like a doctor misdiagnosing your condition, prescribing the wrong meds and making your worse than you started out. Self-discovery is going to be the first key to your success. Contrary to the adage, what you do not know wont hurt you, what you don’t know about you can hurt you. It can halt a major production line if an intricate detail is missing; now everything comes out flawed, not ready for packaging, and can’t be shipped out. You are holding up your own progress!



A second key to success is how you define success. Some people view success as a status or acquisition of "stuff". I asked my niece Tymia, what she thought being successful meant and here is what she had to say:" it means to achieve a goal". Therefore, I asked her, "If you don’t achieve that goal have you still succeeded?" She said, "Yes." I said, "Why do you say that?" She said, "Because you had to work hard at trying in the first place". "In other words you are successful because you didn’t stop trying?" She said, "Exactly!" Pretty smart for a nine year old, huh? How do you define the word success?

I looked up the word success and here is what Encarta had to say:

• Attainment of wealth, fame, or power: an impressive achievement because of a record of achievement. (Ask yourself, who are you trying to impress?)

• Achievement of intention; achieving something planned or attempted (It doesn’t have to be planned or done correctly on first try. The only way you fail is if it never comes into realization)

Words synonymous with success are accomplishment, victory, triumph, realization, attainment, and winner. The only word I found as an antonym was failure. So I queried failure:

• Breakdown in performance of something

• Lack of development or production

• To collapse or fall down suddenly, decrease in value

Which takes us to key number three: You must take action! When you stop moving, you start collapsing.

John C. Maxwell quoted author C. D. Jackson:

“Great ideas need landing gear as well as wings.” Any idea that remains only an idea doesn’t make a great impact. The real power of an idea comes when it goes from abstraction to application.

Some think failure is the part of the process when you make mistakes. Conversely, the correction of mistakes is where you achieve greatness. If you don’t take action you won’t know what works. You may have to do it 10 times or 100 times. You can’t give up. “If there is no struggle there is no progress,” (Frederick Douglass). This brings us to our last key of success, resilience.

The uphill trudge will seem hard because you may not know exactly what you are supposed to do, where you are supposed to go, and you won’t know everyone you need to know. As you get moving and continue the process, resources will start to cross your path. Tackle your goal in bite size pieces instead of larger chunks. This is true for any goal you plan to accomplish. It’s like exercising. If you are new to doing it, it can become overwhelming. Instead of spending 3 days a week performing an hour of strenuous exercise, try spending 5 days a week doing 30 minutes of exercise. Of course this would be tweaked based on personal preferences and situations. The key is frequency. Five days of shorter times will motivate you to stick with it versus fewer days of longer periods. Frequency is going to promote a habit that will create lifestyle changes. You have to see it all the way through to the end. The more you expose yourself to the commitment you have made the sooner you will start to see progress.

In conclusion, the four keys to success are (1) be in tune with yourself, (2) define success for your purpose, (3) take action, and (4) see it through to the end.


Pamela D. Ballard