1. Motivational Skills
In the words of ET the Hip Hop Preacher, “When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, then you will be successful.” Now you may not think that a burning desire to achieve is a skill, but it in essence it is the skill that carries us through to the end, to our final glorious destination that we can then look back and revel in. Lighting your burning desire and keeping it lit is the skill.
2. Communication Skills
As you begin your success journey (once you’ve lit your burning desire dynamite wick), for the most part many people will realize quite soon that as fantastic that we all think we are, we need other people in some way shape or form. We need to take to other people, communicate with people; communicating with people can be in the form of writing copy for your ebook, enticing a client to buy your “platinum package,” thanking/acknowledging the lady who cleans your office or even the drunk stranger you might meet in a bar who gives you some overwhelming enlightenment about what you’re doing wrong in your career/business. Personally I am a very independent, slightly introverted person, but despite this, I (and so should you) am well aware that two heads are better than one.
3. Organisation Skills
The world is full of distractions, from TVs, to friends, to families, to adverts on the internet. If you go ahead with your dream or your plan, unless you have some guru-like focus, you will need to organise your life. Organizing your life is difficult if it’s a mess, at least for the first few days, but once you’ve got your house cleaned, start writing down all the things that you need to do each day and complete them all, as soon as you can and to the best of your ability. Take a shot writing lists for a week, everyday write down a minimum of 5 important things that you know/want/need to do and put a time by all of them, once the clock strikes that time then force yourself to do it; you could do various things, whether its sell your old stuff on eBay, write a blog post, push out 10-20 pushups, it doesn’t matter, break your goal into smaller objectives, write them on paper and complete them step by step. You will see a seemingly magical improvement which in itself will motivate you to continue to organize, achieve and be successful.
4. Emotional Intelligence Skills
Think about someone successful, put yourself in their shoes, and think about a hard decision they will have made and ask yourself whether you would have cowered away due to fear. For example, take Usain Bolt, think about the decision to become and continue being a sprinter, with a potential lack of employment opportunities looming over him and more negatives, would you have cowered away for fear of being broke? Yes, of course, everyone fears the future, but again, fuel your burning desire to achieve, communicate and get help, organize your life and then conquer your fears and other success suppressant emotions. Throughout life we are bombarded by ups and downs but if you want to be a successful person then you will have to learn to grow exponentially on the up’s and continue to fight through the down’s. Arguments, fights and negativity from other people only slows you down when you deem them to be stronger than you, at the end of the day, emotions are simply bio-chemical fluctuations in your body and you need to see them as such and understand that the “feel” of them will pass. Thomas Edison’s teachers said he was “too stupid to learn anything.” He was fired from his first two jobs for being “non-productive.” As an inventor, Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. When a reporter asked, “How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?” Edison replied, “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.” As you read through these basic skills you will begin to see what mindset successful people have, you should take this attitude on.
5. Confidence Skills
You don’t have to be confident to be successful, so before you think “okay, I’ve failed, I’m not social nor will I ever be confident,” just wait a moment. You just need to learn to be confident in yourself, and in the fact that you as a person can build something. Many people are blessed from a young age with being a raving extrovert, but the skill comes “secondarily” when you push yourself into new situations, scary or not and do your best to complete what it is you set out to while taking the failures on the chin. Imagine you are standing on a burning building and you know that you able to jump the distance to the next, but it’s simply really high… Simply find certainty and know that you are able to jump that distance and would be able to do it 999999 times out of every 1000000 attempts on the ground, just take the jump and you’ll feel a damn sight better on the other side. This “complex” can be used in both social and business situations, never shy away from an opportunity and never hold yourself back because you “won’t fit in,” when you “don’t” fit in then sure, throw yourself whole heartedly into something new.
6. Self-efficacy Skills
Successful people complete what they start… That’s why they are successful. It doesn’t take a genius to work out the if you set out to make £1,000,000 and you only make £20,000 that you were unsuccessful, but if you leave what you started at £20,000, you then you are only ever going to be unsuccessful. While we can’t achieve everything that we set out to attempt, what splits the successful people from unsuccessful in the long run is the learning, improving, challenging and overcoming. Successful people also know when to stop, for example, a boy tries in vain to grow a wheat by planting a pebble on a sandy beach, of course he could take the principle of “successful people finish what they start,” but he’d be there for a few millenia until the universe shifts and transforms pebbles bits into Eukaryota cells that may, just may, sprout something plant like, but at which point… the boy will be dead. The easier thing would have been to take skill 2 (communication) into thought and sought advice from a farmer.
7. Time Management Skills
Successful people and people that are on track to becoming successful appreciate one thing as the scarcest resource, and that’s Time. Time is the only thing we can’t get more of once it’s spent, money comes and goes, but time once spent, never comes back. Given the above analogy, successful people not only manage their time correctly, by cutting out things such as soap operas and drugs that take up a lot of time but also cut out people that waste their time. Many of us have people in our lives that we can’t say no too, but to free up more time you are going to have to learn to politely tell them to “f” themselves and get on with what you need to do. Once you have your new found time, make sure you don’t waste it watching TV, plan, be organised and communicate with other people to make things happen.
8. Luck Attraction Skills
Luck, yeah, it’s “random,” but successful people attract luck by working hard and sticking to what they do. When you compile all the above skills, you’ll find you attract more luck, like the successful people you aspire the join and supersede. But most of all, successful people know what they want. Featured photo credit: Paxson Woelber via flickr.com
