Swaroop Singh
Everyone wants to be successful whether that means being healthy, being rich, being in a good relationship. Everyone wants these things but some people seem to get it more easily than others. So how do they do it and what can you do to succeed in life? That’s what we’re going to talk about today.
We are talking about five things ( Step by Step ) that you can do to succeed in life.
1. The Vector theory – Here is my golden rule for Success: the key to succeeding in life is to do more of those things that take you closer to your goal and less of those things that take you away. I call this the vector theory.
In physics, a vector is a variable that has both magnitude and direction. And I found that this is also true in life. Everything you do has some magnitude and has a direction that is taking you somewhere. And between these two things, I think direction is more important in the context of success. We think that success happens to people suddenly out of nowhere but actually it happens over multiple small steps but all the steps taken in the same general direction. Once you know the direction or the vector of where you want your life to go, you’ll be able to make choices that take you there. And more importantly, you will know the vector of everything that you do in a day. So you’ll be able to tell what are the things that you do that is helping you and what are the things that you do that is taking you away from your vector. And there may be things that are actually working against you. Arranging your life in terms of your vector would be step number one in succeeding.
Now, some lucky people already know what is the direction of life they want to go in but some people don’t. And the next step is especially for them.
2. Finding the direction of your vector – Here is my framework for deciding the direction of your effort: make a list of all the things that you like doing or you enjoy learning about. Now think of these as points on a map and you are standing in the middle. Now figure out which of these things will be most useful in helping other people live a better life, that should be your career option because remember that society will only pay you money in exchange for the maximum value that you can add to their lives. Everything else on that map will become your personal growth list, things that you do for your own pleasure, for your own personal growth. Now it’s okay if you don’t know the exact location of where you want to go, just knowing the general direction is enough because it can act like a North Star, something that helps you make choices when you are confused. Look for someone who can guide you or someone who is doing something that you admire, this is the role of a mentor. And this is how the vector theory helps you make more good decisions than bad because as you go further along in your journey, each decision will take you a little further towards your goal. And as you reach closer and closer, some interesting things will happen. You will notice small forks in the road, you will notice choices that you never even thought about at the beginning. And in many ways, there is an advantage of not knowing the exact destination at the start of a journey because people who decide their final destination early on will often miss out on exploring new opportunities. Like it happens when you put an exact location on Google Maps, only that road will get highlighted and all the other roads will get muted.
Similarly, deciding too early on might not be a good idea and keeping your options open leaves you with more room to work with. So trust the general direction in which you’re going and get started.
3. How to get there – Now according to the vector theory, everything has magnitude and direction. So we already spoke about direction but what about magnitude? Finding the right people who are going in your direction, finding the right books, talking about what you are interested in, following the right people on YouTube, reading the right blogs, all of these things will help you think in a certain way that will take you closer and closer to your goal. Faster. On the other hand, people who will distract you with vectors that are not in your direction and habits that slow you down or even stop you, all these things will only take you away from your goal. The analogy that I usually give is if you’re standing at a crossroad and you know that you want to get to a certain point, you can either walk which is going by yourself or you can take a train which is the equivalent of joining a company or a business that is already doing what you want to do or you can get a car and drive yourself, this is the equivalent of starting your own company. This gives you maximum flexibility and independence but at the same time, there’s also risk because if the car breaks down then all the responsibility is on you. Practically, most people who succeed do a combination of all these three things. They start walking because they know that they want to go in that direction, they’ll meet other people, they will collaborate with them, they might join businesses who are heading in that direction and eventually, they’ll start thinking of doing something on their own. Now assuming that you’re already on your way, what next? That brings me to step number four which is
4. Feedback and course correction – The single metric that will determine how quickly you reach your destination is how quickly you can find out if you’re going in the wrong direction and that is what feedback means. And that is why it is so important to be open to feedback and not consider feedback as failure because remember that every time you fail all it means is that one of your strategies did not go according to plan. Because the sooner you can take feedback, the faster you can correct your course and make sure you’re going in the direction of your goal. The time of feedback decides the rate of your growth. The feedback should be fast enough that you don’t end up making the same mistakes over and over again but at the same time, it should not be so fast that you don’t have time to learn. So another key to success is learning quickly. How quickly you learn will determine how quickly you can take feedback and that will determine how quickly you can stay on your track. A good way to improve the quality of your feedback is a) to make it measurable so you know that you have a metric to follow and b) to determine whose feedback is valuable and whose feedback is not. Find people whose judgment you trust and give more value to their feedback whether it’s positive or negative. And on the other hand, if an anonymous stranger on the Internet is giving you feedback, give it less value, even if it is positive. Don’t congratulate yourself too much just because someone said hey, you’re doing a good job or hey, you’re doing a horrible job. It’s okay. Remember to trust yourself and watch out for confirmation bias because you might only pick up those feedbacks that align with what you already believe in. So don’t segregate feedback by what message it has, segregate feedback by the credibility of the source. And finally, step number five is to look out for boosters.
5. Boosters – Now, boosters are events that happen on your journey to success that give you a jetpack. It gives you a boost. It allows you to reach your destination faster. Now what are these boosters?
• People – These are cheerleaders and partners who will join you along your way to help you with advice, support, and valuable feedback. So while at the beginning of your journey you might think that you’re walking alone, as you go further along, you will find others to join you.
• Another booster that people often forget about is compounding. And the reason people ignore this is because compounding is exponential. The rewards that you get for your effort is not going to be the same on day one as compared to day 100 and day thousand. And because the human brain is wired to only think of the ‘here and now,’ it doesn’t do a very good job thinking of long-term effects. Just like how people who do day trading in the stock market often find that the best strategy is actually to just invest in long-term funds. Similarly, for finding success, we underestimate the effect that compounding brings. Your pattern recognition gets better over time, your resilience gets better over time. What would have taken you three days earlier would now only take you three hours or three minutes to do. And as your knowledge gets better, you get more efficient and everything gets done faster. So compounding is a huge booster that comes in along your journey towards success.
• Another booster that you get on your journey is capex or capital expenditure. These are the investments that you make at the start of your journey to make your overall journey more comfortable. These are the systems that you’ve created that are repeatedly useful, information that you’ve learned that you can use along the way, protocols that you’ve set in place. The advantages of all these things build up over time.
So there you have it, five steps that you will go through on your path to success. I hope you found this useful. If you like this, please comment below to motivate me to create more posts like this. All the best to all of you.