How To Become Successful

Hey, what’s up? This is Leo from Actualized.org, and this is a quick self-help segment where, in about ten minutes or less, I’m going to tell you how to become successful. This is a big topic to bite off. In fact, this is one of my favourite topics to talk about. This is why I created my website, Actualized.org, to really understand the psychology of success.

That is such a deep rabbit hole to go down, I literally have hundreds of ideas on this. Here, in this quick little segment, I’m going to give you some of the basics, some of the fundamentals, maybe some of the practical things you can do.

I’m actually going to reference Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has a great video on this, where he talks about his six principles for success. I’m going to reference a little bit of that and throw in some of my ideas.

The Six Principles

His six principles of success — I’m going to just list them out.
One: trust yourself.
Two: break the rules.
Three: don’t fear failure.
Four: Don’t listen to the naysayers.
Five: Work your butt off.
Six: Give back.

Let’s cover some of these and some other ideas. First of all, trust yourself. I think here, what he’s saying is you have to really understand yourself. You have to understand what you want out of life, what you really value. What you find meaningful. What are you passionate about. You have to align your passion with your work.

If those two are not aligned, you will not be successful, I guarantee it. You will not be successful. Even if you are, it’s going to be a very shallow kind of success. You’ve got to do a little bit of self-exploration. That means go out and try some stuff.

If you’re still early in your life and you haven’t had a lot of jobs, go out and experiment and just see what resonates with you. You don’t even know what you like yet. If you’re a little bit older, you’ve probably had a little bit of that experience. You’re more cognisant of what you like and what you don’t. You have more stipulations.

You have to sit down and really write this out, and be very methodical and strategic about what you want. You have to get clear about your values, you have to get clear about your top five feelings. You have to get clear about your life pšurpose, and I cover all these topics really, really in-depth on Actualized.org with other videos. You might want to check those out.

Knowing yourself is very important, otherwise you’re not going to — your work is just not going to be aligned. The next thing is, I would say, hard work. Hard work is really important. To be successful and to be at the top ten percent of the population in terms of success, all those people worked their asses off. You’re not going to be successful without hard work.

The reason is not even that you have to go out there and build a giant empire or you have to amass an amount of money, or work long hours, it’s not even so much about that. It’s that you need to develop yourself, because success is not so much an outer world state as an inner world state.

Success Comes From Within

That might sound hokey and new-age, but it’s very true. Success is grounded within you. You’re not going to be able to maintain any level of success if you do not have the psychology to really follow principles, to know how to maintain success, to think strategically, to think long-term, to delay gratification, to resist addictions. All these factors come into play.

For me, success is grounded in self-mastery. It’s understanding yourself and building on that, building disciplines, building successful habits which then move you towards where you want to be going.

The next point is that you really have to choose a career path for yourself. What is it that you’re going to be mastering? I tell everybody to create a personal mission statement. On that mission statement, one of the things I instruct everybody to do, all of my clients and all my listeners, all my viewers, is to pick one thing they’re going to be mastering over the next ten years, that they’re going to be totally committed to.

What is that thing for you? Are you like Arnold Schwarzenegger and you want to be the worlds best body builder? Do you want to be the best computer programmer? Do you want to be a highly paid movies star? What do you want to be doing with your life? Do you want to be an athlete?

There’s all these infinite possibilities. You have to pick something and really commit to it, and burn all your bridges so that you can’t go back, so that there’s only going forward and that no matter what obstacles are on your way, you’re still going to be going.

I guarantee you there are going to be obstacles, and the biggest problem with people not being successful is that they dabble too much. George Leonard talks about this in his brilliant book, Mastery, which you must read if you want to become successful in life. I cover that in other videos as well. I have videos on it that cover it in depth, but you should check out the book itself.

Most people are dabblers.That means that they do a little bit here, a little bit there, they try this, they try that and they’re all over the place. They don’t have focus. They’re not committed to anything.

Do Not Dabble

With that kind of mindset, you cannot be successful. You have to put your time in. Success is a slow cooking recipe, it’s like a stew. It’s not a quick little stir fry, it’s a stew. It has to marinate. That marination process doesn’t take a year, it doesn’t take two years — it takes more like ten or twenty years. We’re talking about decades.

Go into something with that kind of mindset. You can already sense, if you’re going to be putting ten to twenty years into something, you have to know what you’re putting it into is going to be something that’s going to be aligned with your values, it’s going to be something you find passion in, something you find really meaningful, something you find rewarding, something you find interesting, something that’s fascinating to you and you’re curious about.

What is that for you? If you don’t know what that is, you want to go out there and explore, maybe do some brainstorming, do some journaling about it. Start looking into that, start finding that out. You’ll probably also want to go and find out what your major strengths are, by taking the strengths survey at Authentichappiness.com.

It’s a free survey from Martin Seligman, he’s the founder of the positive psychology movement. If you take that survey, it’ll give you your top five strengths out of a list of twenty four. Those strengths should strongly guide you in the direction of where you want your career path to go. You’ll have to think about that.

The other thing, I would say, is figure out exactly what you don’t want. Sometimes we know what we want, but we don’t think about what we don’t want. Part of that is, for example, people pursuing a career very rigorously. Maybe somebody wants to become a doctor, or a lawyer, or they want to become a CEO, or whatever professionally, but they don’t think about the lifestyle that comes with that.

It’s very important to both think about your career and your lifestyle simultaneously and to see how those two are going to meet together, how they’re going to dovetail. You want them to dovetail well.

For example, do you want to do a lot of traveling? Do you want to be living in different countries around the world? How important is money to you? How important is financial independence to you? How important is creative autonomy to you?

How important is that your job has a lot of creativity? How important is it that your job is you sitting in a cubicle all by yourself and being able to focus and concentrate? Or maybe you’re the type of person that really finds it interesting to be talking to people all the time, and you can’t stand sitting in a cubicle, and you need to be in a very social environment.

Or maybe you can’t even stand to be in a social environment in the office, you want to be outside the office, you want to be working in the outdoors. You’ve got to take all these factors into consideration. Write down the list of things you know you absolutely don’t want.

Maybe you don’t want to be working for somebody else. That’s important. That’s something I had to find out the hard way, by going and working for somebody, only to realise I cannot work for other people. I’m too creative, I’m too excited about getting my own ideas out to be implementing somebody else’s.

For me, that meant my only real route was entrepreneurship, starting my own business, working for myself, being self-employed. That was a big shift I had to make. I lost some time and some opportunities by not having realised that earlier. Sometimes you’ve got to make those mistakes to really understand it.

Experiment!

You can’t just understand it in the abstract. You’ve got to go out there and experiment, try this stuff around. Success will come to you if you hit all these points. You’re working hard, you know yourself, you’re aligned with your life purpose, you know what that is and you’ve chosen a path of mastery. That means you’re going to be committed to it for years and decades.

It’s going to be hard to be a failure when you’ve got all those elements in place. The last element I’m going to talk about is this element of self-mastery. I think that’s what ties it all together. If you’ve got all those other points, but you don’t really have a mastery of your own emotions and psychology, what’s going to happen is that you’re going to have problems that are going to creep up.

You’re going to hit obstacles, you’re going to have points where you’re going to think about failing. You’re going to have points where you’re going to be feeling like you’re not achieving as much as you want to be. You’re going to have points where you have a major setback in your business or your career, you get fired, you get laid off, something like that.

You need to be able to deal with those. You need to have awareness and control over your emotions, which is what I call self-mastery. That’s a topic that I’m really, deeply passionate about, that I cover very deeply in other topics on Actualized.org, that you’ll probably want to check out in other videos.

I think you’ve got to commit to that as well. If you’re committed to that, then you’re committed to really understanding your own psychology. You’re committed to mastering yourself. From that flows everything else. From that will flow your career. From that will also flow your relationship. From that will flow your money management abilities, and your fitness, and your ability to do everything in life.

Study Success

That’s just such a critical component. I think the other last element, kind of a cherry on top of it all, is that successful people study success. They study other successful people, because success leaves clues. You can see other successful people are doing something different than normal people are doing.

One of the things they do differently is that they interact with those successful people, and they learn from them. They buy books, they attend seminars, they’re always learning. You’ve got to keep your mind open. Always be committed to learning, be curious about everything.

Above everything, study personal development. You’re going to learn what the psychology of success is. When you read books every once in a while, and you attend a seminar once a year, and you mastermind with other successful people, you’re going to see the commonalities.

Their success is going to rub off on you. Not in the sense that they’re going to give you money or fame, or something like that, but they’re mindsets are going to rub off on you. Then you’re going to use those in your own unique way, to go out there and create the kind of success that you want in your career, and in your business, wherever that takes you, whatever your path is.

Then, of course, as Arnold Schwarzenegger says, give back. Success should not be about accumulating a bunch of money, or getting prestige or fame. Success should be about you doing something positive for the world. To be successful, you need to be aligned with value-giving.

You cannot be a value-leech and be successful in the long run. I see people making this mistake. You need to be a value-provider. You need to see you’re not just providing value as in giving charity, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m saying you need to provide value in a way where people are getting a lot more from you than you’re charging them.

When that is happening, then people want to be associated with you, they want to interact with you, they want to hire you, they want to do business with you. They want to become your clients. Through that process, you cannot fail to get success.

The fact is, thought, that handling all those points I mentioned, even though it’s simple, can be challenging. Especially staying on track with that. I hope you do that. That’s why I create resources on Actualized.org.

Wrap Up

I’m going to wrap up this video here. Go ahead and post your comments. Share it, like it. More importantly, if you’re really committed to success, I highly encourage you to go to Actualized.org, check out our other advanced, free videos, some of our courses there, and sign up to the newsletter, so you can be immersed in this theory of success.

I cover psychology of success in pretty much every single video that I shoot. The more you learn it, the more you immerse yourself in it, whether from me or from somebody else, I don’t care, the more successful you’re likely to be, the more you’re likely to stay on track with success. It’s all about how long you’re able to stay on course.

Success is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. This is Leo, signing off.