How Do You Define Success?

A new study from The Hartford set out to discover what constitutes success in the eyes of small business owners. Here’s what the Small Business Success Study of 2,000 small business owners found:
Overall, business owners are feeling good. One in five (22.9 percent) say their businesses are very or extremely successful. Nearly half (46.8 percent) say their businesses are moderately successful. Just 30.3 percent say their businesses were “slightly” or “not at all” successful. Asked to project forward for the next two years, only 6 percent feel they won’t achieve success in that time frame.

The survey also asked small business owners to choose their top answer from among various definitions of success. The top three responses were:

Make enough money to have a comfortable lifestyle: 24 percent

Do something I enjoy or feel passionate about: 23 percent

Increase the profitability of the business year to year: 18 percent

Other possible answers, including “have the free time to do whatever I wish,” “expand to new markets,” and “sell the business for a substantial profit,” were far below the top three, only garnering single-digit responses.

Based on how small business owners themselves define success, what type of small business owner is the most successful? The Hartford found that the entrepreneurs who feel most successful are those who have 10 to 20 employees and have been in business for more than 20 years.

This group was more likely than average to say their businesses are currently successful. They were also more confident about the future. And they were significantly more likely to admit they’re closer to “complete” success.

What’s enabled them to succeed? The study found two key steps these businesses took: they used professional advisers to prepare for future growth, and they realized that paying employees well attracts better workers and leads to greater success.

Of course, simply having stayed in business for 20-plus years was surely a contributing factor to feeling successful. But it seems to me that entrepreneurs who enjoy the greatest success have a realistic attitude toward their business. They don’t expect miracles, but they do have goals and plans. They’re optimistic and they enjoy what they’re doing. Sounds like most of the small business owners I know!

Success Secrets That Work

All that it takes to succeed in any area of our life, all we need is to know how things work in that particular area. There are however general rules that apply to all areas.

To succeed in life requires the following:


!. Understanding the meaning of success, or the definition of success, which both mean the same thing.


2. Setting personal goals, learning goal setting techniques and goal setting strategies.


3. Understanding how motivation works and what self-improvement is and its role in motivation.


4. Understanding the right attitude to have in order to succeed.


5. Knowing the importance of human values in success.


6. Finding what you are passionate about.


7. Understanding the role of Willpower in success.


8. Understanding the importance of self-control.


9. Knowing the importance of communication and how to communicate effectively.


10. Understanding the importance of networking.


The success secrets I share with you are secrets that I have learnt while going through the thick and thin of life and learnt from psychology, philosophy, mythology, history, religion, personal development/success literature, management, as well as from my own observation and personal experience.


What I share with you here are fully tried and tested, as I personally use them in my own life and for others; they work with 100% accuracy.


All you need to do is to learn these success secrets and apply them in your life.

Indra Nooyi’s Management Mantras for Success

Indra Krishnamurthy Nooyi, Chairman, PepsiCo is one of the world’s 100 most influential people. Here are some words of wisdom from a business woman whom Time magazine has described as a ‘world class leader.’ Read on.

• You give a team of people a set of objectives and goals and get them all to buy into it, and they can move mountains•Aim high and put your heart into it.

• What’s important is trying to be the best and working to get there. And that’s how you fulfill your potential.

• I’m putting my hand up and saying, ‘Able body, ready to work. I can scrub floors to address big issues.

Work for the right person. Work for a company that wants you to succeed. Don’t play politics and just focus on the job at hand

•Take a stand. Be known for your courage and confidence.

• Success isn’t money, prestige or power because net worth can never define self-worth. True success is being happy with yourself, is being fulfilled. And that comes from devoting your time, your life, to doing what you love the most.

• At the end of the day if I stand back and have regrets, it is never going to work. You just look forward and get on with life.

• What you know is more important than who you know because that’s what gets you ‘who you know.’

• Don’t think of the difficult journey. Think, instead, of the wonderful destination.

• We are too attached to the known security of the past and too wary of the challenging promises of the future. This often leads to complacency or inertia.

• You’ve got to say, at every point in your life, if you were to drop dead, would your epitaph be something that you could be proud of? Is your legacy something that would linger long after you?

• If there is (a glass ceiling), remember it is made of glass and it can be easily broken. All you have to do is try.

• The best test is that I wake up every morning dying to come to work.

• My parents and my grandfather taught me that when you do a job, you got to do it better than everybody else. Simple. You cannot let anybody down.

• When you don’t have a safety net, when you don’t have money to buy clothes for interviews and you are going to a summer job in saris, all of a sudden life gives you a wakeup call and you realise that you have got to work extremely hard to make it happen for you.

• I grew up with a mother who said, ‘I’ll arrange a marriage for you at 18,’ but she also said that we could achieve anything we put our minds to and encouraged us to dream of becoming prime minister or president. She made me learn Indian classical music because that’s what good Indian girls did, but she also let me be in a rock band. ‘You’ve got to be a good Indian woman first,’ she said, ‘but go ahead and dream.’

• As a child in India, my mother would ask a simple but compelling question: ‘What would you do to change the world?’ Today, my answer would be that I want to lead a company that is a force for good in the world.

• We say someone is good company when we enjoy being with them. A good company creates that kind of enjoyment. In the process, it creates a strong sense of identity. People come together in pursuit of the same goals. A team is formed.

• Being a good business starts with being a good employer.

• Good candidates can pick and choose more between companies who make similar offers to them. The deciding factor is the kind of company that they want to work for. They are comfortable in societies with many cultures, they want to work flexibly. They are both more demanding and more in demand. They want success, but not at any price. They want to do some good in the world.

• To be successful in foreign countries, you got to walk a mile in the shoes of those people; while in Rome, do as the Romans do. You retain your Indianness, but you also have to adapt to what that country needs. If you remain too isolated, you will never be successful.

• The toughest thing about transformation is letting your best friends and people you worked with for years leave and go off on their own.

• To attract the best people, we have got to create an environment where people can actually balance life.

• In every change agenda, there is always going to be a percentage of people — like 10% or something — that are not going to agree to the new agenda. They are the casualties of the change. If they have to go, they have to go.


 A good company offers employees a career, not just a job. To describe it as a career shows that we have an enduring interest in someone. They are not here today, gone tomorrow and thanks for what we could take from you.

• You should never wait until somebody is ready to say goodbye to tell them how much you value them.

• Today’s is a war for talent. People don’t come into the company and stay for reasons other than compensation

• Ever since I have been in the work life, I have always used a simple rule: Whatever I did, I had to produce an output that was so much better than what somebody else did. So I would work extra hard at it. More hours, yes. More sacrifices and trade-offs, yes. This is the only journey I know. I don’t know what it is to have the cushy life and go home to watch the 6.00 news.

• Leadership is hard to define and good leadership even harder. But if you can get people to follow you to the ends of the earth, you are a great leader.

• I have a five Cs model for leadership: competence (damn good at getting results); confidence to have the courage to make the tough calls; communication skills, to convey your vision and direction; compass pointed north to your true values; compassion — empathy, not sympathy

• As a leader, I am tough on myself and I raise the standard for everybody; however, I am very caring because I want people to excel at what they are doing so that they can aspire to be me in the future.

• To be a CEO is a calling. You should not do it because it is a job. It is a calling and you have got to be involved in it with your head, heart and hands. Your heart has got to be in the job, you got to love what you do, it consumes you. And if you are not willing to get into the CEO job that way, there is no point getting into it.

One of the most important things for a leader is to identify their own core competency. In my case, my core competency is my ability to be able to demystify any complicated problem. I continuously strive to enhance that core competency.

• A leader must have the courage and confidence to stand up and defend his/ her ideas.

• Effective communication is the key to success. Clarity and conciseness are critical for effective communication. I urge you to read speeches of great leaders like Abraham Lincoln or John F Kennedy to see how they were able inspire people.

• Consistency is an important aspect of leadership since it helps build trust in those that follow you.

Be honest in appraisals. If people aren’t performing well, help them ‘cross the bridge’ and get where they need to go by examining why they aren’t performing. Raise the bar as the boss.

• Coaches or mentors are very important. They could be anyone — your husband, other family members or your boss. But you cannot pick them. They will pick you.

• Don’t expect to be on the same promotional track as someone who works five days a week if you work three days a week. In less than ideal situations tough it out, try to change it and then leave even if it means not working for some time.

• The minute you’ve developed a new business model, it’s extinct, because somebody is going to copy it.

5 Reasons Why Trying to be Successful Will Keep You Poor

Dave Navarro wrote recently that worrying about what you’re doing (or not doing) is the surest way to keep you poor and unsuccessful.
It’s a cracking article with a heap of good points, one of them being that the key difference in the way successful people operate is that they see failure as an integral part of the process of achieving success.
That’s true. Unless you plan on spending all your time underneath your duvet, failure is in your destiny. Trying to minimize or avoid failure will not help you be successful.
But here’s the thing. Trying to be successful will not help you actually become successful, either.
The problem with success

You’re probably here because you want to be a successful person. You want the material and emotional benefits that come with that.
That’s awesome and I want it to happen for you. But while there’s nothing wrong with success, there are five important reasons why success for its own sake is the wrong focus:

1. Success is a moving target

Be honest, what’s success for you?
Is it about launching a product and having people buy it?
Is it about having respect from your peers and mentors?
Is it about doing what you love so you can care for your family?
Too many people don’t create their own definition of success. They chase an idea they’ve patched together from what they’ve read, observed, or think they should be aiming for.
Do you know the feeling of not being wholly convinced that you’re pursuing the right success for you, but you’ve carried on regardless? That’s not how real success is achieved. Because even if you’re outwardly successful, you’ll feel disconnected from it. Achieving the wrong kind of success will always feel hollow.

2. Success is the wrong motivator

It’s too often based on extrinsic factors — the things you believe success can deliver.
Whether it’s physical goods, the feeling that you’ve “made it,” or thinking you’ll be free of worry and stress, these are all externalized projections about what a successful lifestyle will bring you.
When you make decisions based on an external motivator, it’s much easier to second-guess yourself. Motivation that comes from within is much more grounded and more powerful.

3. Success isn’t here, now

If you’re working hard to make something happen, it’s easy to dream about the moment you become successful. We all tend to fantastize about that big pay-off for all our hard work.
That kind of success is always elusively around the next bend. Just a few more weeks or months away. Just a bit more work, and you’ll finally be successful.
But what about now? What’s stopping you from feeling like a success right now, this very moment? Waiting for success in the future takes you out of the game in the present.

4. Success does not eliminate worry or fear

Being successful does not change how your brain works.
Success often increases worry and fear, as you question how you can repeat it or worry about losing it.
What eliminates worry and fear is shifting the patterns of thinking that result in self-doubt and second-guessing.

5. Success is limited by confidence

Perhaps most important, any success you might experience is limited by your self-confidence.
If success is achieved by taking repeated, meaningful action, then what happens if you’re not confident enough to take the actions that scare the crap out of you?
What will you do when things go wrong? Without confidence, you’ll be more inclined to retreat, beat yourself up, and reinforce a negative self-image. Nasty.
Placing your efforts on being a “successful person” is putting energy into the wrong place. It’s allowing in the complications I’ve listed above (and there are more that I haven’t listed) and ignoring how you’re thinking about what you’re doing and how you’re doing it right now.
Instead, what I’m suggesting is that you place your focus squarely on becoming a confident person, rather than a successful one.
To borrow from Dave’s article:
Success is not a person. It’s an event.
Shift your thinking from being a successful person to a confident one, and you’ll experience more success events and more failure events, both of which have abundant rewards. Here’s how to do it, right now.
Engage, today

I’m always banging on about playing a game that matters, for the simple reason that it forces you to deeply engage with something that has personal meaning. It aligns your efforts with what matters to you and ensures that you’re intrinsically motivated to play to the best of your ability.
If you want to be the best tennis player you can be, it will only really happen if you get enjoyment from the act of playing tennis. Start off with the aim of winning a shiny cup and you’re setting yourself up for struggle and second-guessing.
Forget the rules, just play

Rolling around in your head are expectations about what you can and can’t do, should and shouldn’t do, must and mustn’t do. Then you add in all the expectations you have about other people.
And most brain-numbing of all, you have expectations about what other people expect of you.
Forget all of that and just play. The best tennis players aren’t darting around the court thinking about how they should play the game. They use natural ability and learned skills and strategies to play to their best level.
Take confident action

Confident action is about making deliberate choices.
Confident action is using your values, strengths, and talents to support your decisions and the actions that follow.
Confident action is trusting yourself to make the next decision, no matter how this one turns out.
Listen to the voices

Those voices in your head can be confusing, but you need to listen to them (unless they’re telling you to set fire to the town hall), because that’s the only way to recognize what’s real and what’s imagined.
You don’t want to let those voices control your thinking, or you’ll be running in circles forever. But you do want to start paying attention to them, noticing the difference between the voice of fear and one of your best assets, your intuiton.
It’s by acknowledging what goes on in your head that you learn about what serves you well and what holds you back. You learn the voice of imagined fear, you learn the voice of solid doubt (and can take appropriate action in response to those risks), and you learn the still, quiet voice of intuition that will always tell you what you need to know.
Decide what’s important

Don’t shoot the messenger, but things will go wrong and you will screw up.
The good news is that you always get to choose how you think about what goes wrong. A screw-up is only a big deal if you decide it is. By looking at it in a different way, there’s no need to retreat or beat yourself up.
Plus, simply because you’re intrinsically motivated by playing a game that matters, the idea of “failure” has far less power than if you’re extrinsically motivated, and sometimes the power of “failure” disappears completely. You get to decide what’s important.
The real difference that makes success happen

Don’t think in terms of successful people or unsuccessul people. We all experience success and failure throughout our lives — remember, success and failure are not people, they’re events.
People experience success because they’ve achieved a level of natural self-confidence that allows them to take meaningful action.
They’ve achieved a level of natural self-confidence that allows them to trust their behavior, rather than focusing on the outcome of that behavior.
I want to know what you think. How do you see confidence and success? Let us know in the comments.
About the Author: As a leading confidence coach with clients around the world, Steve Errey has a reputation for talking sense and getting results. Get more from him at The Confidence Guy.

FOR THOSE WHO HAVE SUFFERED

I asked God for strength, that I might achieve.

I was made weak, that I might learn humbly to obey . . .

I asked for health, that I might do greater things.

I was given infirmity, that I might do better things ...

I asked for riches, that I might be happy.

I was given poverty, that I might be wise ...

I asked for power, that I might have the praise of men.

I was given weakness, that I might feel the need of God .. .

I asked for all things, that I might enjoy life.

I was given life, that I might enjoy all things ...

I got nothing I asked for--but everything I had hoped for.

Almost despite myself, my unspoken prayers were answered.

I, among all men, am most richly blessed!

14 Ways to Be a Success in Life!

1. Compliment three people everyday.

2. Watch a sunrise at least once a year.

3. Be the first to say hello.

4. Live beneath your means.

5. Treat everyone as you would want to be treated.

6. Never give up on anybody; miracles happen.

7. Never deprive people of hope; it may be all they have.

8. Pray not for things, but for wisdom and courage.

9. Be tough-minded, but tenderhearted.

10. Be kinder than necessary.

11. Keep your promises.

12. Learn to show cheerfulness, even when you don't feel like it.

13. Remember that overnight success usually takes about fifteen years.

14. Never waste an opportunity to tell people you love them.

10 Steps to a Successful Career Change

1. Evaluate your current job satisfaction. Keep a journal of your daily reactions to your job situation and look for recurring themes. Which aspects of your current job do you like/dislike? Are your dissatisfactions related to the content of your work your company culture or the people with whom you work?


2. Assess your interests, values and skills through self help resources like the exercises inWhat Color is Your Parachute. Review past successful roles, volunteer work, projects and jobs to identify preferred activities and skills. Determine whether your core values and skills are addressed through your current career.


3. Brainstorm ideas for career alternatives by discussing your core values/skills with friends, family, networking contacts and counselors. Visit career libraries and use online resources like those found in the Career Advice section of the Job Search website.


4. Conduct a preliminary comparative evaluation of several fields to identify a few targets for in depth research.


5. Read as much as you can about those fields and reach out to personal contacts in those arenas for informational interviews.


6. Shadow professionals in fields of primary interest to observe work first hand. Spend anywhere from a few hours to a few days job shadowing people who have jobs that interest you. Your college Career Office is a good place to find alumni volunteers who are willing to host job shadowers.


7. Identify volunteer and freelance activities related to your target field to test your interest e.g. if you are thinking of publishing as a career, try editing the PTA newsletter. If you're interested in working with animals, volunteer at your local shelter.


8. Investigate educational opportunities that would bridge your background to your new field. Consider taking an evening course at a local college. Spend some time at one day or weekend seminars. Contact professional groups in your target field for suggestions.


9. Look for ways to develop new skills in your current job which would pave the way for a change e.g. offer to write a grant proposal if grant writing is valued in your new field. If your company offers in-house training, sign up for as many classes as you can.


10. Consider alternative roles within your current industry which would utilize the industry knowledge you already have e.g. If you are a store manger for a large retail chain and have grown tired of the evening and weekend hours consider a move to corporate recruiting within the retail industry. Or if you are a programmer who doesn't want to program, consider technical sales or project management.