What I wish I learned as a teenager!

What are the secrets to success?

This is a topic that almost everyone has an opinion on. Since a very young age, we receive information and advice from our teachers, parents and other elders about the qualities we need to develop in order to ensure that we achieve success in any endeavour that we undertake. I can remember as far back as when I was in pre-school, where one of our teachers was listing qualities that the great men of history possessed that helped them achieve amazing things in their lives. Hard work, dedication, sacrifice, industriousness, having a goal etc. were some of the qualities that were often repeated and held up as keys to success in life. However, looking back at my childhood I now realize that many of these qualities though held up as ideals, were only encouraged to be put into practise when we were engaged in academic work or activities that our teachers and parents approved of. When it came to sports or other hobbies that were not really encouraged except as occasional recreational activities, we were given the impression that these qualities did not really apply while we engaged in them. When I was around the age of 10 or 12 years, I developed a great passion for football. At that young age, the sport of football captured my interest and imagination far more than anything that was being taught at school. Due to the keen interest that I had developed in football, I wanted to ensure that I got very good at it. Therefore, I spent a lot of my free time trying to get better at football.

The moment I started doing this, I had a lot of people telling me that it was a waste of time and that I should instead concentrate on things that would be more useful to me later in life. They advised me that as the likelihood of me making it as a professional footballer was very low; I should not really dedicate too much time to trying to become better at it. When I heard this, it made a lot of sense to me. I knew that becoming a professional footballer was something that would be quite unlikely for me and to be honest, I never even had a genuine desire to become a professional. However, football was something that I really loved back then and all I wanted was to get good enough at it so that I could impress my schoolmates and be one of the best footballers in my high school. However, due to all the negative feedback that I got from my teachers and family, I dropped it and spent less and less time on it over the years.

When I look back now, I feel that though we were all inundated with a lot of information on the traits that are essential to success in life from a very young age, there is one aspect that is crucial to success that was almost never highlighted. That crucial aspect that was rarely every mentioned is Momentum! We have all heard of the expression “Success begets success”. What it means is that when you achieve success in something, it makes it more likely for you to replicate it and achieve another success. The funny part about this is that the moment you feel successful because you hit a target or goal, regardless of what area it is in or how small it is, you feel good about yourself and this triggers a whole host of positive things. You feel an increased trust and confidence in yourself, you feel more enthusiastic about pursuing other future goals, and you experience a surge in motivation to experience those pleasant feelings again by ensuring that you achieve another success. All of this leads to an upward positive spiral that makes it more likely that you achieve success in any other project or endeavour that you engage in next.

In the book “The Slight Edge” which is one of my favourite books that I constantly turn to, the author Jeff Olson lays down what he calls as the seven principles of the Slight Edge. Broadly speaking what these principles represent is basically a set of rules to follow and live by that gives us the highest chances of ensuring that we achieve success in any goal that we wish to accomplish. Put succinctly the rules are as follows:

1. Show up (to practise your craft).

2. Be consistent.

3. Possess a positive attitude as you show up consistently.

4. Be committed over a long period of time.

5. Have faith and a burning desire.

6. Be willing to pay the price.

7. Have the integrity to put in the work even when nobody is watching.

These seven principles provide us with a broad framework that if followed, would ensure that we achieve at the very least a significant degree of success in whatever it is that we are pursuing. When we glance at these seven principles, it feels like they are pretty straightforward and most of us would not argue against their validity. However, while we may understand them pretty easily, actually embodying them and sticking to these principles is quite tough and needs concerted effort .But once we are able to build a habit of sticking to these principles while pursuing a goal and we end up achieving what we set out to achieve in any particular area of our lives, these principles get ingrained more deeply in us. We begin to realize that if we follow these principles, we might be able to succeed in other things that we wish to accomplish. Things that maybe harder and for which we may not have the same amount of intrinsic motivation, but things that we know would massively benefit our lives. These things become relatively easier to achieve than they were before because we are now riding the wave of momentum. We now see ourselves differently. We look at ourselves as capable of hitting our targets and additionally many of the habits that are essential to success are now more ingrained in us.

Tying it back to what I was talking about earlier, at that stage of my life, football was something that fascinated me, I was way more intrinsically motivated to get good at football than learn Math or any other boring subjects that were being taught at school. If I could go back in time, what I wish someone had done was guide me and made me focus on these general principles that are essential to get good at any skill and encouraged me to hone these attributes albeit while applying it to football and then when I did see improvements in my skill, encouraged me to apply these same principles to academics or other things that I was not so interested in. I feel that achieving progress and getting good at football would have meant a lot to me and would have helped me really ingrain these principles by creating very strong indelible associations between these principles and being successful at something.

Last year in January, when I was reading the Slight Edge, I was just setting foot on a journey of trying to overcome my anxiety and getting good at public speaking. It was something that I had been putting off for a long time and something that I really wanted to achieve. I decided at the beginning of the year that I would just try to stick to these seven Slight Edge principles and work on my public speaking for one year without constantly worrying and obsessing about my progress. That one year was really eye opening! Just following these principles over the course of the entire year, helped me make progress that was beyond what I had expected. More than anything else, it gave me massive amounts of momentum in the right direction and now I am trying to apply those same principles to other aspects of my life this year.

To conclude, I would say that one of the main factors that fuel success at least in my experience is momentum. Momentum gained from previous successes! I would urge all of you to give it a try. Pick something that you already have a lot of interest in, work on it by applying these principles and get some successes under your belt in some area of your life. As soon as that happens, you would have activated the power of momentum in your favour and you can then use that to keep going and build on it and crush one goal after another! Until next time..