A very famous personality once said that “DON’T RUN TOWARDS SUCCESS, BUT RUN TOWARDS EXCELLENCE, SUCCESS WILL AUTOMATICALLY COME TO YOU”.
So in order to achieve success, or to be successful in life one needs to be excellent or should go for excellence, but a person going towards it needs some tools that will help him reach his goal, i.e.
Excellence---à Success.
For reaching towards Excellence one must also have a Personality by which he can achieve Excellence, Bill Gates once in an interview said that “only those persons can afford to say that money is not important who have lots of it”. A shabby person will not look good telling how to dress properly. Likewise only that person can reach towards excellence that has a personality to reach there.
Many Scholars have given various Principles, thoughts etc on How to be Successful or Excel in life. In this paper I have stated 6 simple points on which if a person works on 90 days he/ she can move towards his goal (Excellence) very quickly and smoothly. I said 90 days because there is a saying that ”What we learn for a day gets stores for 7 days, what we learn for 7 days gets store for 21 days, what we learn for 21 days gets stored for 90 days and WHAT WE LEARN FOR 90 DAYS REMAINS WITH US FOR WHOLE LIFE”.
In this paper we will look on 6 (Six) points, i.e. A = Attitude, B=Behavior, C= Communication skills, D= Desire, E= Environment and F= Focus and their relation with each other and by using their combination how a person can reach towards Excellence and thus attain SUCCESS.
INTRODUCTION
Every person we meet wants success! If in an interview an interviewer ask question what you want to be? 75% of interviewee says, “I want to be Successful”. Parents, Elders keep on saying to their wards that go for success, do not waste time loitering around. What is Success that everyone keeps on saying?
Success in the opinion of few is when a person is rich, happy, content with his life; etc is successful or has achieve success. But is it really so? Success does not have a universal definition some say being rich is success, being on top of a company is success and so on, but the truth is that success has a different meaning for different people. For a Hungry person getting one meal is success, for a student who learns his first alphabet is success, etc.
Now next question arise how do we get success? Same is the case with this question also that for different people there are different ways to get success. But I like the answer of Mr. Amir Khan, a famous bollywood actor who said in one of his film, that “Do not run for Success, go for EXCELLENCE, Success will come to you automatically”. So now we have one answer for getting success and that is we have to aim for Excellence and we will get success in life.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
Now another question arises which is, what is Excellence and how to get it? Excellence is, ‘the state or quality of excelling or being exceptionally good; extreme merit; superiority’. A great biblical verse explains the meaning of Excellence as, ‘The man become great. He continue to become greater until he was exceedingly great (Genesis chapter 26 verse 13). Now for the second part of the question as to how to achieve excellence, the answer is simple enough, “HAVE A GREAT PERSONALITY”, if you have a good and great personality than you can achieve excellence in a very short span of time and with great ease and comfort.
But here many people get stuck, as they argue that our personality is good enough, I have a great personality but then also I am not getting towards excellence or success. I am well dressed, I speak English, I take bath daily and so on and forth, but actually the thing is that they are only focusing on the outer aspect of their personality and do not look towards the inner self, or intrinsic factors that constitute a personality, it might be possible that a person who dresses well, have a good accent, etc might not be that successful as he ought to be. That is only because he does not have those intrinsic factors working well enough for him. I constitute these factors as A, B, C, D, E and F of the personality. If a person focuses on these factors than no one can stop him from becoming successful. Now let us study these points in detail and see that how there combination works.
FRAMEWORK
We know that Success is not measured by our position in life but by the obstacles we overcome to get there. Some people succeed because they are destined to, but most because they are determined. For getting towards success a person needs to do hard work and must apply full energy as a great scholar once said, “The Pain of hard work is temporary, but the pain of regret is permanent”. People who succeed in life have a personality by which they outshine everyone else. Here in the figure five points are shown which are necessary to be present in human being for him to be successful in life.
Firstly, for a person to be successful he must have the A, i.e. the Attitude which defines the way one thinks, feels, acts or reacts in a particular situation. I have come across many people who by changing their attitudes have changed their way of life. “Attitudes are mirrors of mind; they reflect the thinking of a person”. A person having positive attitude has a positive way of dealing with all kinds of situations he may face in the tenure of his life. A person can move towards the path of success with choosing right steps and having right kind of attitude. The Attitude of a person determines his Altitude, a person with high and positive attitude walks 25% faster than an average man. We can come to know the importance of attitude in a person’s life by calculating the word ATTITUDE:
KNOWLEDGE = 11+ 14+15+23+12+5+7+5 = 92
ATTITUDE = 1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100
ATTITUDE + TALENT = SUCCESS
ATTITUDE – TALENT = DELAYED SUCCESS
By thus simple calculation we come to know that Knowledge is necessary but Attitude is far more necessary than knowledge as with only knowledge one cannot achieve success.
“ATTITUDES CAN ONLY BE SEEN FROM MINDSIGHT AND NOT FROM EYESIGHT”
Next, we come to the second important point of a good personality which is BEHAVIOUR, and is defined as “The actions or reactions of a person or animal in response to external or internal stimuli”. It is a well known fact that a person or persons only likes to interact with those who have a good behavior. If you are a person of sound behavior than you can solve many problems with the help of it whether it may be your workplace, home, school, society, etc.
By sound behavior we not only means the way to act in a particular event but to be reliable, hard working, honest, being positive, proactive etc so that with you many can also be benefitted.
Third main point for being successful is Communication Skills, which constitute 7% of the personality. Communication Skills can be defined as the way by which a person communicates and share his feelings with others be it by saying, writing, gesturing, etc. For effective communication a person needs to be clear in his thoughts, he must know how, what and when to communicate with others.
A person must also know about the do’s and don’ts of communication, he must be clear, concise in his words, must have a complete meaning about what he wants to say and so on.
It was found in a study that for achieving SUCCESS, you must have 12% of good behavior, 7% of communication skill and 81% of attitude in you.
We have now looked how attitude, behavior and communication effects a person’s personality but have we all wondered that why some people still do not get success in their life irrespective of having the 3 core ingredients with them, it is only because of few missing points that they have ignored unintentionally and have suffered due to it.
These points are Desire, Environment and Focus, desire plays a very major role in achieving success as a person who does not have a desire to do some work will not be able to do it be as hard as he tries to do. There is one more point worth mentioning here which is that desire does not come from the mind it comes from the heart, if you apply your heart for a work or goal and work on it then you are bound to get success.
Now if the person is having a desire for a goal then he needs a suitable environment also to get success, here I do not mean that if he does not have the correct environment than he will be termed as a failure, No! There are no failures in the society there are only people having success and people having delayed success. If a person gets right environment he will achieve his goal easily and get success, else a person with an unfavorable environment will also get success but after some time as he has to first make the environment favorable.
The last point in this respect from my side is making his environment favorable for achieving his goal. FOCUS, which itself tells us the way to success,
F = FOLLOW
O = ONE
C = COURSE
U = UNTIL
S = SUCCESS
A person having no focus is a plane with no navigation system, it knows where it wants to go, but does not know how to reach there. An unfocussed person is like a flying kite with no one to guide him, he just keeps on flying but with no one to guide him he does not reach his goals and achieve success. Focus is very much necessary for a person as it helps him not only in achieving his goal but also helps him being a good and respected citizen of the society.
“Of course there is no formula for success except perhaps an unconditional acceptance of life and what it brings”. – Arthur Rubinstein
SUGGESTIONS AND CONCLUSIONS
- Identify skills that are of value to you, your family, your company and society, as these skills can be very useful for you in every sphere of life.
- Keep your skills up to date, because if we think that we have accomplished everything in life, that is the point from where the downfall starts. So we need to keep our knowledge at par with the changing scenario.
- There are two kinds of people in the world, one who learn from mistakes of others and other are those who learn by committing mistakes themselves. For those second types of persons if they are not able to drive their life then they should “FIND A MENTOR”.
- Don’t hesitate to CHANGE, Change is inevitable, every person changes at one stage or another. So the person should not resist change, else it becomes very much difficult for the person to survive.
- “Work for the best and prepare for the worst”, a person should give his best in whatever he does but at the same time he should be prepared for ups and downs in his life.
- Learn from leaders, we should take the examples of leaders and persons who have reached to the peak in their respective areas and try to make ourselves better.
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One should never leave the side of HOPE (Have Open Perspective of Environment) but also not depend fully on that too, as excess of everything is harmful. There is a saying that goes,
