Everyone loves to succeed, however not many people ever get to live their dreams. So, why do so few people succeed while so many live in mediocrity? The simple answer is that they ignore the first rule of success: dreaming big and working hard to attain those dreams.
Begin by dreaming big
According to John A. Appleman, the first ingredient of success is to dream big. This means that unless you aspire or dream big, you can never accomplish anything. And the good news is that there are no limits to your aspirations and to have a small dream is as bad as committing a heinous crime.
No one ever dreams of failure or aspires to be unsuccessful. Failure does not play any role in dreaming. Even when people fail, it is the dreamer that instills failure, not the dream. Dreaming does not mean that the person harboring the dream will not fail. Actually, many successful people have failed countless times before they experienced success. The only difference between is that such people did not allow failure to determine who they were. Instead, failure motivated them to dream bigger and find another way to achieve their dreams.
Manage failures
While addressing a gathering of young people in Dhaka, Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, former President of India said “There will always be problems in life. Problems should never be your driver; instead you should be the driver of your problems. To succeed, you need to defeat problems.”
According to Dr. Kalam, managing success is easy for everyone; however managing failure is what most people never learn. Managing failure is a big issue; it is what makes leaders big. Great leaders know how to handle failure and success effectively.
The power of positive thinking
Great leaders engage the principles of positive thinking when failure threatens to pull them down. Such people understand that there are no shortcuts to making their lives better except by first getting better themselves. To put it simply, if you intend to change your life positively, you must begin by getting better − from the inside out.
Work hard
Dreaming is the easy part of success; acting on the dream is the hard part. To transform your dreams into reality, you have to work hard.
Any successful person will tell you that getting to the top does not come easy. Someone has to put in the hard work in the trenches of life before they can wear the victor’s crown. Unlike what most people think, successful people do not stumble upon success. Instead, they work hard day in day out until they attain their dreams. In the words of Henry Ford, the harder you work, the luckier you get.