Douglas: Welcome to the Unleash Your Potential Blog, what question can I answer for you today?
AmbitionAI: What strategies can help me achieve long-term success?
Douglas: Thank you so much for asking. This is a great question and it would be easy to start writing about ways to achieve long-term success, but I don’t believe that to be the most effective way to address your question.
For many people focusing on the long-term can set them up for failure. I know it does for me. Don’t get me wrong, I have long-term goals and it is important to be thinking down the road. However, I think the key to long-term success is in how you stack and re-create a pattern of short-term success. What are the small steps you are succeeding at every day? What are the challenges you are conquering in the near term that develop into a cycle of resilience?
With that, I offer you some suggestions for short-term success which over time can be stacked into a habit. Once you establish a habit of successful behaviors, you greatly increase the likelihood of long-term success.
Plan, Plan, Plan – Success, whether in the short- or long-term, does not usually happen by accident. You have to develop long-term goals and then break them down into smaller action steps you can work on every day. Once you have the action steps, determine the resources you need to achieve them. And finally, REVIEW this plan every day. Make adjustments to the plan as needed. It is easy to create the plan and think you are done. This is a recipe for failure. A strong plan will be a living plan that adjusts as life throws you challenges.
Give Yourself Grace – You are going to encounter obstacles. Short- and long-term success is not defined by the absence of challenges and failures. They are defined by your resilience in how you consistently overcome those challenges and learn from them. Part of resilience is the ability to allow yourself to fail without defining yourself as a failure. “I am a person who experiences failure” is a very different thought from “I am a failure.” Grace is the ability to believe the former. Grace says, “I failed at this thing and that’s okay because I am not defined by my failures, but my ability to keep going and try another way.” Grace sets you up to try again and find another path to success.
Small Steps Matter…but ONLY if you KEEP taking them – Once you have a plan, you have to take a step. And once you take that step, you have to take another. There are a wide variety of pithy statements that talk about the importance of taking the first step, so I won’t repeat them here. However, what they say is true. Each small step you take has one of two outcomes. Outcome #1 is success and you can celebrate it and allow it to propel you forward. Outcome #2 is a failure, and if you remember to give yourself grace, you can learn from the failure and chart a new path to success. You can avoid failure by not trying, but by doing that you are avoiding success. If you want long-term success, you need to risk failure so you can have short-term success.
Use Your People Resources – Very few people succeed in the long- or short-term all by themselves. It is important to recognize that there are people along the way who can help you and then engage their support. Sometimes that help is a friendly voice who helps you bolster your confidence. Other times it is a mentor or teacher who helps you learn a skill you need to be successful. Once in a while, it is someone who helps you carry the load when it is too much for you at that moment. There are so many more examples of effective people resources. The point is that you have to be willing to acknowledge that you need support and then be open to accepting it without feeling that it makes you weak or a failure because you didn’t do it on your own. Even as I sit here writing my 100-day blog, I realize that without the constant support of my wife, encouraging me on the days I may not want to write, I would likely not succeed.
As I said at the start of today’s thoughts, long-term success is an excellent goal, but I believe the rubber hits the road in how we develop a habit of short-term success that defines our long-term success. Start today stacking short-term success and down the road, you will be able to look back on a pattern of success that lasts for the long term.
I hope my answer sheds some light on your question. If you want to dig into this concept further, I encourage you to reach out and set up a conversation. In the meantime, check back tomorrow for the next question in the Unleash Your Potential Series!
Be Well!
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