Recipe for Success: 7 steps

“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” - Robert Browning.

Here are my learnings on how to succeed in life. I am summarizing the seven steps with key phrases that are just three words long as it makes it easy to remember and recall. I feel these seven steps are lessons for life and we should keep revisiting them often. This is my recipe for
success!

1. Find a Goal

The first ingredient of this recipe is to find a goal. A goal gives us a sense of direction but it need not be our final destination. We need to choose a goal without factoring in our capabilities. Ideally a goal should be such that its pursuit is a lifelong adventure yet it is very hard to achieve. We need to segment our path to the chosen goal into multiple milestones!

2. Power of reason

The power of reason to keep us focussed on our hard to achieve goal. We need to search deep within ourselves for an appealing reason as to why we really need to achieve our goal instead of leading a comfortably-numb life. If our reason is strong enough it could last us a lifetime. If not then we would need to reinforce our reasons with introspection at short regular intervals.

3. Choose a mentor

Now that we have a goal and a reason for achieving it, we need a mentor to guide us in each milestone. We need to be careful in choosing one - a right mentor is one who has previously threaded the similar path to next milestone we set for ourselves.

4. Have Blind Faith

Once you have chosen a mentor, have blind faith in their abilities to guide us towards the next milestone. Blind faith explains the placebo effect i.e. why just sugar pills or unscientific homeopathic pills help one relieve their symptoms or cure their illness. This is the reason why we should not investigate the background and achievements of our mentor or motivational speaker (e.g. this author) as this eliminates the contribution of blind faith. This is also the reason why we should not share our goal and reason with others.

5. World's best motivator

The world’s best motivator is no one else other than ourselves. When the voice within us awakens and speaks to us constantly then we can realize our true potential. We could phrase some key phrases and subvocalize it to keep motivating ourselves.

6. Ground-zero is Goldmine

At a goldmine we will be rewarded for the amount of work we put in at the mine but not for the hard work required to reach the goldmine. We should always believe that our ground-zero or the place of action is a gold mine, if not then it is not worth spending our time at this place. The moment we realize that we are not at a goldmine then it is time to change our ground-zero.

7. Personal best performance

The main aim of this recipe is self-actualisation. If we follow this recipe to its truest sense then we reach our true potential. We might not be able to reach the goal we set out in Step1 as that depends on our abilities as well as the amount of hard work we actually put in. But we can ensure that we give our personal best performance. We should be content with the result as long as we have given our best!