One thing that most of us have in common is that we all want to succeed. In fact, it can be said that the only thing that separates successful people from those who don’t succeed is that the successful people are more determined to succeed than the rest.
There are a number of traits that successful people share. If you wish to become successful, you will want to incorporate these traits within your person strategy for success. However, before talking more about these traits, first let us learn about strategy.
Many uninformed individuals are under the impression that strategy and tactics are the same things. However, they are not. Strategy is much higher than mere tactics, and from a battlefield perspective, tactics can be thought of as the techniques which fall under a larger strategy.
To understand strategy, you have to think of things in a military perspective. For example, how many times in history has a country or nation won numerous battles, but lost the war? History books are full of the countless tales of formidable armies that won battles, but could not win the war.
While winning battles requires tactics, winning wars requires strategy. Developing a personal strategy of success involves looking beyond your daily struggles and battles. Instead, it involves looking at these only in the context of their interconnectedness to the greater goal.
Before you can develop a personal strategy for success, you must first develop a definitive goal. This goal is your life’s mission, the one thing that you want more than anything else. What is your goal?
- For Alexander the Great, his goal was to conquer the known world of his time.
- For Albert Einstein, his goal was to revolutionize the world of physics.
- For Muhammed Ali, his goal was to become the greatest boxer that the world had ever seen.
Inculcating the Proper Traits
In his book "The 33 Strategies of War", author Roberte Greene speaks about Grand Strategy. This is the overarching strategy that you use in order to accomplish your goals. The best way to develop a personal strategy for success is to make use of Grand Strategy.
Have a goal in life that you want to achieve, once you are absolutely obsessed with, and then develop strategies to help you achieve the end goal. Perhaps the best way to do this is to study successful people, and the traits they share. However, when you study successful people, do not just pay attention to what they have, or what they have gained. This is what the average man or woman does.
The typical person can only pay attention to the results of one’s success. The wise man, instead of paying attention to the end results of one’s success, they pay attention to the underlying steps that was necessary for the individual to achieve this success.
By doing this, you can begin to pick up traits which can be incorporated into your own personal strategy of success. First, successful people tend to have a great deal of persistence. No matter how many times they fail, they keep right on trying. Second, many successful people know their limitations and strengths. They are more than willing to delegate to others when they do not have the energy to get the job done alone.
Successful people also are not afraid to become leaders, and will travel in directions where others are afraid to go. In other words, instead of being afraid of the unknown, you must learn to embrace it. Doing this requires you to overcome fear.
Fear is one of the main things which keeps the typical person from success. When presented with a challenge, they back down from fear of failure. Another trait that many people share is that they do not know how to work well in a team, or even lead it. For some of us, working together with people is hard.
The Importance of Teamwork
In a training program called BUDs, or the Basic Underwater Demolitions training that a candidate must go through in order to become a Navy Seal. Participants go through one week training course which is called Hell Week.
During Hell Week, participants only get four hours asleep (the entire week), and must go through rigorous and difficult training, often spending their nights in icy cold water. In many cases, 80% of those who enter BUDs training fail within days. Only a handful actually make it through this extremely difficult week.
One of the men overseeing the participants stated that it is "all about teamwork." He stated that those who attempted to rely on their own strength to make it through Hell Week fail. In fact, the biggest guys are often the ones to quit first because they are too dependent on their own bodies in order to make it. Just as with BUDs, if you want to be successful in life, you must understand the importance of teamwork, and incorporate it into your personal strategy of success.
