Are You Waiting For Success? 6 Principles For Breaking The Waiting Game

Are you waiting for success? If you are, it will never arrive. Success is who you are and what you do daily and night.
It is not a reward or a destination. Success is a way of traveling, tiling, and gardening. In my opinion, there are no successful people, only people who enjoy successful moments in time…
We hear about them every single day.

He was in the right place at the right time.
Her timing was perfect.
It was an idea whose time had come.
She knows what she wants and goes after it with a passion.

For the most part, these statements apply to others. Rarely do we direct them toward ourselves. But what if we could say proudly and honestly?

I placed myself in the right place at the right time.
My timing was perfect.
It was my idea whose time had come.
I know what I want and am passionate about going after it.

So, why not?

The primary reason is that we are out of sync, as if the spark plug distributor sent the signal to the engine cylinders at the wrong time.
Timing may not be everything in life, but when it comes to success, it’s challenging to think of another single factor that makes or breaks more people’s lives.

Everything ultimately happens at a point in time, and when the convergence of factors in time is positive … success is unavoidable!

Mastering time — not only the minutes and hours of each day but also the “times” of one’s life — is essential to turning dreams into reality and achieving goals.

Literature and everyday conversation are both filled with references to the seasons of a person’s life. The seasons are not mere literary devices or metaphors; they are genuine. Life has phases and passages. It has periods delineated by beginnings and endings. Most importantly, these periods come in sequence.

Are you waiting for success? If you are, then follow these 6 principles.

Principle 1: View your failures as an opportunity to learn.

Failure is a delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead-end street. Regard it as a short-term phenomenon.

Choose to use failure as the fertilizer of your success. Farmers use decomposed plants and other substances to fertilize their crops. In much the same way, you can use your failures and disappointments to enrich the soil of your mind for planting the seeds of success.

Some people say that failure should be avoided at all costs. But if you think it through, that cost is too high. The only way to avoid failure at all costs is to do nothing. Although you avoid failure and defeat by doing nothing, you also avoid success and fulfillment.

The way to turn failure into fertilizer is to use your errors and mistakes as a way to learn and then dismiss them from your mind. Use failures and disappointments only as corrective feedback to get you on target again.

It has been said that failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker.

The board game we all play, Monopoly, was created by Charles Darrow, an unemployed heating engineer. In 1935, Darrow took his first version to a toy company. That company initially rejected the game because it contained fifty-two fundamental errors. Darrow wasn’t defeated, however. He used that temporary failure to refine his success!

Today, the game is so popular that its maker, Parker Brothers, prints more Monopoly money yearly than the amount of real money published annually by the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

Only one danger can arise from an adversity mistake the failure as yourself rather than as an event. Contemporary psychologists agree that setbacks and failures mean little in themselves. The meaning of any failure or any success, for that matter, is in how we take it and what we make of it.

Principle 2: Dreams and goals must be charted to be realized.

A dream is your creative vision for your life in the future. It is what you would like life to become. A goal is what, specifically, you intend to achieve.

Dreams and goals should be just out of your present reach but not out of sight. Two great tragedies in life are never having great dreams and goals for yourself and fully reaching them so that tomorrow holds no eager anticipation of a challenge.

Many individuals become spectators, resigned to experience success vicariously through others’ accomplishments. They can see success for others, but they can’t imagine it for themselves.

Dreams and goals are the previews of coming attractions in your life.
Several common denominators make the critical difference between those who are successful achievers and those who are part of the vast unsuccessful majority. The following are three of them:

• Successful people believe in their dreams, even if thoughts are all they must do.
• Successful people shape their dreams into specific goals and action plans. They have a sense of direction. They know where they are headed. Furthermore, they project dreams and goals into time.
• Successful people work on their plans. They exert effort, adapt, and persevere until their goals are reached. They develop the skills needed for planting, replanting, and cultivating until they reap the desired harvest. They put in the time required.

Your dreams and goals are vital to your success, but they will never yield success until you place them in time.

Perhaps the most incredible torture that could be devised would be for us to be forced, in our later years, to watch a continuously repeating videotape of the lives we could have led had we dared to believe in and pursue the dreams and goals that were available and attainable in our lifetimes.

Principle 3: Your purpose in life will determine how you choose to segment and prioritize your time.

Our purpose is the engine that powers our lives. Without it, we toil in a job but never build a career. Without meaning, work becomes a necessary interruption between weekends. For many people, weekends are an escape from a weekly prison of purposelessness.

The success of an effort depends not so much on the outcome of the shot but on the motive for making an effort in the first place. The purpose makes the difference.

The most significant companies, the most remarkable men and women in all walks of life, have achieved their greatness out of a desire to express something within themselves that had to be revealed, a desire to solve a problem using their skills and creativity as best they could.

This is not to say that many of these individuals have not earned much money and prestige for their accomplishments. Many have; however, the key to their success was that they were motivated more by providing excellence in a product or service to fill a need than by thinking of profit.

All of your real value and worth is built in by design. You received it as a precious present when God gave you the gift of life. That gift- all of what’s in you- is all the value you’ll ever need. It isn’t a matter of finding value, earning amount, or proving value. It’s a matter of living up to the value built-in at the beginning.

Truly successful individuals look to contribute, not to receive. Employees who love their mission and work get raises and promotions more often than those who care the most about getting the raises and promotions.

Real winners don’t look for achievements that will bring them the most with the least amount of effort. They look for the challenges that will mean the most to overcome. They do not seek rich-quick schemes or lottery jackpots. They look for something difficult -some problems to solve — and accomplishing this will give them great personal satisfaction.

Many people don’t have the vaguest idea about their purpose in life. They lack a spiritual connection and are not open to looking beyond their mortality for meaning.

For them, I offer the idea that they can begin to discover their purpose by learning the most, experiencing the most, and sharing the most value they possibly can with other human beings.

Making life easier for one person every day is creating an excellent start toward a destination that we can never fully reach, but it will be a process that gives meaning to our existence. There is always another opportunity to learn, grow, and extend our reach to someone groping for our strength.

Principle 4: Your sense of responsibility and your integrity keep you concerned with time.

Why are American industries suffering from foreign competition? Why are companies downsizing? Why are future generations likely to enjoy less prosperity than their parents have? Why is the American dream fading? Who is to blame?

The real problem is that everyone is pointing the finger at someone else.

“Concern yourself more with accepting responsibility than with assigning blame. Let the possibilities inspire you more than the obstacles discourage you.” — Ralph Marston.

A person of integrity does not blame others for his failure or expect others to provide for his success. He shoulders his destiny.
If there’s one quality above all others that we humans should value, it is this: Personal responsibility. We must take 100 percent of the blame for our choices and actions in life.

Every decision has a corresponding reward or consequence based on the integrity of that choice.

A little quote above my desk guides me through the seasons:

“life is like a field of newly fallen snow; where I choose to walk, every step will show.”

Principle 5: Perseverance maintains you over time

Lack of persistence is why most people fail to attain their goals. Perseverance means doing the tough things first and looking downstream for gratification and rewards.

It means being dedicated to gaining more knowledge and making more progress. It means making more calls, going more miles, establishing more contacts, challenging more of your time-grown assumptions, getting up earlier, and always being on the lookout for a better way of doing what you’re doing.

“Through perseverance, many people win success out of what seemed destined to be certain failure.” — Benjamin Disraeli.

Perseverance is sticking with it when the odds stack up against you. It is very often taking the road least traveled by your friends and peers. Perseverance is not complaining but sustaining.
Patience is the subtle side of persistence.

Patience cautions us to focus our efforts on what we can change and accept what we cannot. When external circumstances rain on our parade, patience is our umbrella. Instead of blaming what we cannot control, patience gives us pause for reflection so we can dry off and start looking for a new way.

Everything, over time, is either ongoing or off-going. We achieve our goals, abandon them, or hang in there!

When a goal is distant and difficult to reach, patience is our ally. Time changes everything, but we can keep our desires relatively constant with patience. If we can hang on long enough, we know that time will finally create the conditions for our success.

How does patience relate to the deep desire to find a destiny worthy of ourselves? It is indispensable. No one can attain the fullness of his or her whole life early in life or according to a timetable.

No one can find a destiny worthy of a whole life without living that entire life conscientiously, passionately, and organically in the natural order in which it comes. When we plant a flower or a tree, we need to have the patience to let it grow and scan with the same, which is true of ourselves.

We will continue to grow as long as we pursue our most profound destiny. We cannot choose the day or time when we will bloom fully. It will happen in its own time. The secret to success is to live wholeheartedly, honestly, and steadfastly in each you take as it comes.

Principle 6: Success is SEQUENCED in time.

Almost everything in life can be broken down into phases. Wed that with our lives. Even though we live our lives as a seamless day-to-day flow, we speak about infancy, childhood, teenage years, college days, young adult years, middle age, and golden years as if they were specific stages or phases through which we all go through.

The same holds for the phases of our success management. The seasons of our success are stages, segments, and time frames. The good news is that unlike the seasons of the year or the seasons of your life, you can control the seasons of your success. You make time work for you!

In your success journey, it’s not a matter of being in the right place at the right time nearly as much as it is of determining what the right place and time ought to be!

In conclusion, success is not a distant destination to be awaited; it is woven into the fabric of each day and night. It is a continuous journey shaped by our actions, timing, and perseverance. Success is not reserved for a select few but is accessible to all who dare to embrace it.

To achieve success, we must view failure as an opportunity to learn and grow, chart our dreams into actionable goals, align our purpose with our actions, take personal responsibility, and persist with time. Success is not random; it is sequenced in time, with each phase requiring deliberate effort and timing.

As we navigate through the seasons of our success, let us remember that success is not merely about being in the right place at the right time but defining and creating our opportunities. So, why not seize the moment, cultivate our dreams, and embark on the journey to our version of success? After all, the time for success is now.

Originally published at https://www.thebrilliance.org on March 23, 2024.