Succeed in Your Life
Are you afraid that you're going about life all wrong? Do you want to do whatever you can to increase your chances of living a long, happy, fulfilling life? Read below for some basic advice on how to succeed and improve your life.
Contents
Steps
Taking Responsibility
- Stop blaming others and making excuses. It really doesn’t make a difference if the problems in your life were caused by someone else. It really doesn’t matter if circumstances in your life make it difficult or almost impossible for you to succeed. You are the only person you can rely on to fix your problems. If you want things to be better, you have to make them better.
- Stop procrastinating. Don’t keep telling yourself that you will go back to school next year or that you’ll study tomorrow or that you’ll apply for that job next week. Putting things off is a sure-fire way to make sure things don’t get done or get done poorly. Tackle problems and tasks early, to give yourself more time to do them properly and excel at what you do.
- Build your skills. Study hard in school and then spend the rest of your life dedicated to becoming better and better at whatever you do. Being good at what you do is the surest way to succeed and create circumstances in which you can better your life.
- Take extra classes and training once you’ve settled into a career to refresh your skills and learn the latest techniques and practices.
- Practice job skills outside of work and use the internet to find helpful techniques and tricks.
- Talk to the masters to get helpful advice and learn from their experience.
- Take care of your body. You don’t want to put in all this effort and not be able to do anything because you’re held back by health problems. Take care of your body by eating right, exercising, and keeping clean. See a doctor when you have problems and make use of preventative care. This will help keep problems from arising and dealing with any problems early will help solve them before they get out of hand.
Showing Compassion
- Be good to your fellow man. Sometimes it’s hard to see why being kind and helpful to others also helps us. Everything in our culture tells us that to get ahead, we need to fight only for ourselves and forget everyone else. But in helping others, we not only create a sense of deep personal fulfillment but we also ensure that other people want to help us. You will be surprised how willing people are to help you when you are widely known as a good, helpful, self-sacrificing person.
- Develop connections. Networking is a great way to move yourself up in the world and get the things you want for your life. Make lots of friends. Meet people that are in well-placed positions in environments where you would like to work. Show everyone you meet how hard you work and how good you are with others. Show them the incredible skills you’ve built. Everyone will be itching to recommend you for opportunities they see crop up.
- Create a happy, healthy family life. Marriage and children are not for everybody, but most people will not feel fulfilled without some kind of companionship. Especially as we age, it’s easy to become lonely, as friendships tend to fade as others become more attached to their families. Build a support network, whether it’s a spouse, life-long partner, children, pets, or strong sibling relationships.
Planning Effectively
- Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Thinking positive will only get you so far. You should, of course, always hope for the best. You should expect that wonderful things will happen for you because they often will. However, you need to also be willing to work hard for good things and plan ahead for how you will deal with hardships or plans which go wrong. There is nothing wrong with being prepared for bad things, it will simply make you better able to handle situations that arise.
- Get yourself on a career path. This will be an important aspect of succeeding in life. Jumping from temporary job to temporary job will make it very hard to move up to bigger and better things, so try to set yourself on a career path as early as possible. Choose something which fits your skills, can provide you with an acceptably comfortable life, and that doesn’t make you miserable. You probably can’t be rock star, but you might surprise yourself with how much you enjoy being a sound technician.
- Be smart about money. A lot of the time, making poor money decisions is what holds us back in life. Avoid large debts, buy only what you need and no more, and avoid unreliable investments. Saving to buy a rental property, for example, is a much more reliable investment than buying stocks in a new company. That $400 cell phone? Try a cheap phone and using the money saved to pay off a credit card.
- Work towards owning a home, car, etc. One of the best ways to succeed and live comfortably is to become as financially secure as possible. Try to work towards owning a home rather than renting, owning your car, and paying off credit card debt. The fewer monthly payments you have to make (or in the case of renting an apartment, the fewer payments that provide no returns), the better able you will be to spend money on things you need and save up for a rainy day.
- Don’t feel that you can’t purchase a home because of your economic status. There are a number of government and bank programs designed to make home ownership accessible to everyone. Look into the HUD program, homepath properties, and local organizations which help first-time home buyers.
Working Hard
- Go above and beyond the call of duty. Don’t just fit your job description, blow it out of the water. Do more than what people expect of you to show that you are capable and dedicated. This will make you much more likely to get promotions and recommendations.
- As a teenager, you can use your free time to start a charitable organization. Choose a cause that is important to you and start raising money.
- If you're a teen who is particularly good in a certain subject, help your classmates when you see them struggling. Offer to show them how you tackle problems or ask about starting a tutoring session. Sometimes people can learn better from their peers, who communicate with them more easily, than they can from teachers and you could be doing them a huge service.
- Adults can do this easily by examining every time they find themselves saying "It isn't my problem." It might not be your responsibility to handle that situation but do what you can to do it anyway. For example, if you're a janitor and you see that someone is lost, help them, even though you may not be obligated to even speak to that person.
- Take on more responsibility. When you and your schoolmates or coworkers are asked to volunteer for extra duties, be the first one to volunteer. Look for opportunities where no one is taking responsibility and things are neglected. Like going above and beyond the call of duty, this will show others that you are capable and dedicated, but it will also prove that you are a leader.
- If you're a teenager, get a job as early as you can. It doesn't have to be for very many hours, just enough to have it on a resume. Having a resume that's already filled will show to future employers that you work hard: even if you don't have to.
- Teens can also take on more responsibility by becoming teacher's assistants. Many schools will allow students to take a "class" where they grade papers, organize assignments, and do other tasks to help out in the classroom. This will also look good to colleges and future employers.
- As an adult, suggest a program that can help your place of business and offer to manage the program in addition to the work you already do. For example, you could suggest that every six months the whole office gets together to beautify and organize a room, desk, or office space for one teammate. This will keep things organized and help out stressed coworkers, but it will also show your boss that you are leadership material.
- Aim for better jobs and promotions. Do whatever you can to fight your way up the food chain. Being in better positions will allow you to better provide for yourself and your family. When you see positions open up in your company, apply for them. After you’ve been at a job for a few years, look and apply for jobs elsewhere that will move you further in that career path. Don’t be afraid of failure: you’ll never know if you could get the job if you don’t try!
Warnings
- Just because you aren’t able to achieve your dreams, this doesn’t mean that your life is over. Sometimes we think that we need one particular thing to make us happy and we forget all of the other things that make us happy. If one dream doesn’t work out, find a new one!
