Everyone wants to be successful. Nobody want to Lose. Yet, in life there are winners and losers. Sometimes the consequences of winning or losing can be no more dramatic than feeling elated or downbeat after the event. In other cases, the consequences can be life changing!
In business, there is little doubt, that winning or losing can be pretty life changing. But what is it that makes a winner?
It is often said, particularly in sport, that there is a fine line between winning and losing, and in most cases this is true. A football match can hinge on one particular event that changed the course of the game, and so in life and in business it can often be something comparatively minor that makes a major difference to the end result.
However, you have to look a little deeper than just minor events to understand what factors have the biggest hand in achieving success. If success hinged on minor events such as in my previous example, winning and losing would be a rather more random affair, when clearly it is not. Why is it that the same teams seem to win all the time, and the same athletes seem to be able to overcome the biggest of set-backs only to come out stronger than before?
If you face adversity, yet do not succumb to it, then the experience can only make you stronger. You often hear people say, “whatever doesn’t kill you, will only make you stronger.” But this is very often not the case when an adverse event or tragedy hits someone’s life and they never seem to recover. By the same token, there are also some people who seem to bounce back and get ‘lucky’.
Too many times when trying to understand success, people look at the end result, on events along the way. I believe that in order to understand success, you need to go back to the start, right back to before anything has been done that might or might not contribute towards success or failure. Now in life, this might mean going back to childhood, but we’re not going to get that deep or profound here, because we’re just looking at business.
When starting out in business, you should have a goal. If you go to your bank for a business loan, without a goal, you’re unlikely to get one. The goal has to be very well defined, and in business it is recognised that putting together a business plan is a good way of defining your goal and detailing just how you’re going to achieve it. However, the best laid plans do not always see success.
Despite the goals, and the plans to reach them, circumstances change. So is it the ability to adapt to changing circumstances? Well, perhaps, but many make changes to their plans to accommodate changing circumstances and ultimately fail. So it’s not the plans, nor the goals?
Before I get to what I really believe is the one driving factor in achieving success, and perhaps I’ve given a clue there already, I’d like to point out one key difference between success and failure:
“Success is a path that leads to more success, but failure is a path that leads nowhere.”
Let me explain: if something doesn’t work, many unenlightened people will point it out as a failure. If that is true, then every successful entrepreneur, inventor or leader is a serial failure. I believe that someone who is successful would view it differently, and point it out as a lesson in how to refine their path to success. They change, they adapt and they move on. They try again.
Failure on the other hand is the end. Failure comes as a result of quitting. Failure leads nowhere, and failure absolutely does not adjust, adapt or move on.
So what makes one person adapt, change and try again, whilst someone else will just give up, quit and succumb to failure?
Belief!
Actually truly believing you will win is something that sports psychologists have know the importance of for a very long time. True belief has to have a foundation, otherwise it is not really a belief. An athlete who has not trained for weeks is unlikely to believe that they’re going to win, because that belief is not based in reality. But if action is being taken in order to reach a goal, and set-backs are viewed not only as set-backs but opportunities to refine one’s plans for success, then that belief will have some foundation in reality.
Belief is such a difficult thing to define, but it all comes down to your mindset, and understanding how the subconscious mind drives nearly everything that we do.
Whilst on the surface it may appear that believing something will happen will cause it to happen is just a lot of hocus-pocus, there is some science behind it. Whilst it’s true that the belief in itself is not going to achieve anything, its the affect that deep rooted and absolute belief has on your subconscious mind.
The subconscious mind is not logical, cannot reason, and will only act on a set of ‘programs’. However, it nevertheless is the root cause behind a lot of inexplicably illogical human behaviour, that even the perpetrators cannot often explain themselves. It is also the ‘force’ that drives those successful people towards success at any cost.
Belief has a very profound effect on the subconscious mind because it is also related to emotion. People who are religious are often very emotional about their beliefs and the two are pretty much the same thing. Anything with an emotional attachment will have direct access to the subconscious mind, and can add to the list of ‘programs’ that it works to.
This is just one article that cannot possibly cover the depths required to really understand how belief will affect what you do in life, let alone in business. However, I do recommend further reading or at the very least applying some of the techniques that are taught in ‘Think & Grow Rich’ by Napoleon Hill for instilling belief.
Napoleon Hill talks of drawing on ‘infinite intelligence’ and I believe this is a reference to the power of the subconscious mind, which really will drive you towards achieving a goal if that is what you truly believe you will do.
Truly believing that you will succeed, to the point where you have already played out the successful scenario in your mind’s eye, and felt what it is like to be there, is the key to success and everything else come from there.
