How many times have we heard the adage “nothing succeeds like success”. In a world that looks at achieving targeted numbers as success and holds successful people in high regard, how does one succeed? The best success lesson I learnt was from my Statistics professor during college.
I was totally into public speaking and most of my college days were devoted to participating in public speaking contests. Winning them was a big deal, to us group of students, who lived and breathed these contests. Professors would constantly enquire who won which contest and we would constantly reach out to them for reading lists on various topics or discuss opinions.
However, there was this one phase when I continually lost 5 to 6 of them in a row. I just couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong. After all I was following every rule of writing or delivering a speech that ensured a sure win. When I shared the news about the loss, my professor’s question to me was “that’s ok, but were you satisfied with your performance?” I could not understand what that meant. Here I was trying to find a reason for the losses and all my professor could ask, was about satisfaction! “Always look at every thing that you do in terms of whether you are satisfied /happy with your performance or not. If you are satisfied with your efforts and performance, the rest will follow”.
The next time on, I started focusing my efforts on putting up a performance that made me feel satisfied and results followed just as I was told. I never lost a single competition I took part in for the three years of my degree after that incident. I have tried to very diligently follow that principle in everything I have taken up, be it my lecture assignments, the consultancy projects or my dance theatre. It has only given me success.
We are so caught up with trying to achieve the numbers, we try so much, ‘to succeed’ and we find it eluding us the most. We don’t need to ‘try to be successful’, we just need to put in efforts that makes us feel thoroughly satisfied and happy. The means are as important or probably more important than the end itself. Then you wouldn’t hear of companies needing to decorate results, or fudge numbers to give a false sense of well being.
Instead of only focusing on the sales numbers that we need to achieve, the focus could be on giving a good quality product with good quality customer service. Are we satisfied with our product and customer service? After all, nothing can beat the selling ability of a good product offering, nothing can guarantee product loyalty like good quality customer service, just like no amount of advertising can save a bad product. After all if the basement is weak, the skyscraper standing on that, isn’t going to be standing for long.
We see the same playing out with our favourite sports teams. When individual players play for achieving personal records alone, you find them buckling under pressure, sometimes losing out on what would be opportunities of a lifetime, their teams don’t win too. However when they play with an intention of giving their best to their complete satisfaction, enjoying their work and contributing their efforts for their team, not only does the team win, but personal records are achieved too.
So lets enjoy and excel at what we do, lets put up a performance that we are thoroughly satisfied with , and become successful without trying to be successful!
