A Success Story
Lately I’ve come across a lot of blogs with topics like “15 Habits for Success” or “9 Things Successful People Do Differently.” I am a sucker for self-improvement articles, so I usually stop and read them. I get a few good ideas from them and occasionally walk away fired up to implement a change.
What I’ve come to realize is that reading about what “successful people” do can only take you so far. Most of us don’t realize how hard you have to work at success in order to achieve it, so most of the techniques we read about stay superficial.
An in-depth almost case-like study of one truly successful person’s story would give a much different perspective on what it takes to be successful. Choose a mentor, or someone who has worked hard to achieve something you want. As a job seeker you might pick someone who has recently successfully landed a position in your industry.
Ask that person if they are willing to tell you their success story with all its ups and downs over the course of a month or so. Then dig in. Questions like, “what challenges were unexpected, and how did you overcome them?” and “when the goal seemed out of reach or impossible, how did you convince yourself to keep going?” will help get to the root of the successful outcome.
If you can’t identify a suitable person to take this journey with right now, a readily available next best option is to look for inspiration in the pages of the biography of a famous leader whom you admire.
Michelle St. Onge
