The Success Mindset We All Should Imbibe in Our Lives

 

What kind of ‘success mindset’ do the ultra-rich and insanely successful people possess that magically helps them to bounce back again and again even after facing the toughest of challenges and going through the darkest of phases? Why is it that Jack Ma can fail even in securing the simplest of jobs and still become China’s richest person? How is it possible that people like Elon Musk can transcend the grand crisis he faced in 2008, just on the edge of losing both of his companies and still be able to grab the title for the richest guy in the world?

Countless other questions in the same vicinity simply convey the fact that there has to be something different about people like them, and there is. Among a variety of other things, the main root is the success mindset that’s holding the tree higher than ever. This particular mindset is the backbone of the whole structure on the basis of which they are doing whatever it is they do. If the foundations are shaky and weak then no matter how strong of a building you build over it, it is bound to collapse sooner than later. 

Since the majority of people don’t consider themselves successful, it simply conveys the fact that they are either oblivious of the whole ‘success mindset’ thing one needs to adopt, or are simply delusional and think that they know all about it, when in reality they don’t shit.  

Nobody talks about such imminent topics at schools, colleges, or families. They are more about ‘do this, do that, don’t do this’ and so on, instead of telling us ‘why this, why that, why not this’.

 

Success Mindset #1: Put Your Failures on a Pedestal

Celebrating failures is perhaps the biggest reason why some people are able to just keep moving ahead, pushing the boundaries, and expanding the scope of their potentials.  They are not embarrassed by it, they don’t hide behind it, they are not afraid of it, they don’t use it as a shield to take cover and settle for mediocrity, and they definitely don’t quit because of it. 

In fact, they put their failures on a pedestal, which is what keeps them going. They take inspiration from them because your failures provide you with the biggest room for improvement. They carve and chisel their attitude in such a way that their failure, instead of being an impediment, acts as a bridge to their final destination. 

Take it another way, if you don’t want to fail ever, or are afraid of failing, or are simply embarrassed to fail, then that leaves you with a very narrow path to tread on. The kind of path which isn’t gonna lead you to anyplace meaningful.

And because most of us foster the very same psyche, of not embracing failures, when they do hit a speedbump, which they will sooner or later, they will have no idea how to react or how to take the whole event sportingly. Since they were totally foreign to the success mindset, they would either give the whole thing up as soon as failure strikes or will go apeshit as they wouldn’t have the faintest clue as to what they are gonna do next.

Effectively, pointing out the fact that how imperative, useful, and practical ‘success mindset’ is.

Success Mindset #2: Shut up and Bounce Back

Just to be clear, the whole premise doesn’t imply the fact that you become impervious to anything and everything happening around you. When setbacks happen, surely it will throw even the strongest of people off the track. It will take a toll on the most successful people as well, they aren’t God or something who can dodge anything coming their way.

They are also only humans, they too have emotions, expectations, and the whole baggage that comes with it. Even, they feel sad, depressed, and miserable and all of those things at times when things aren’t exactly rainbow and sunshine. But, what differentiates them, is their ability to bounce back from the deepest of shit holes and stand taller than ever. That’s what makes them unique and successful, all thanks to their success mindset they have been so loyal to.

It all boils down to that first situation where you had the chance to either bounce back or to give in to the heat of the moment and succumb. Once you take comfort under the shadow of the “I Have Had Enough, And I Am Gonna Call It Quits” tree, you are giving birth to a brand new habit that’s gonna be insanely hard to alter at a later point in time. Under no circumstances should you do yourself this big of a disservice as you are gonna regret it for the rest of your lives.

If adversities strike, let them strike; let the hardships shake you as much as they want to. If challenges love testing your water, show them what you’re made of. Just remember this one thing, the only thing you say to the God of Failure is ‘Not Today.’ 

 

This Differentiates the Successful and the Unsuccessful

Although I have pretty conveniently mentioned putting your failures on a pedestal, it’s not a cakewalk or something that you are gonna rejoice in doing. In all honesty, you are gonna loathe it. And for all the valid reasons. 

I mean, if any sane person, who’s working day and night on a project for over a year or so, for every waking second of his life as if his life depended on it, and the whole thing explodes into a bazillion pieces; surely you are gonna be heartbroken and distressed. 

The only thing that will differentiate a sane guy from a successful guy will be the ‘duration’. How long is it gonna take for someone to come out of their worst nightmare to bounce back onto the next big thing? An hour, a day, a week, or a whole year, or probably a whole lifetime?

There are no definitive answers to such subjective questions. But, just to put the whole thing in perspective, if an unsuccessful person is still in his misery bubble for the past 10 or even 20 days, the successful one, on the other hand, would be so hungry and desperate that he won’t be able to afford those many days, mourning. He’d have already begun his next adventure, the next tactic, the next strategy, the next plan on his 2nd day, or maybe his 3rd.(maybe even 4th)

This is why you must have noticed some people going into the ‘never-never land’ who can’t help but remember the failure that shook them up 2yrs back, and ever since then they have been ducking every other opportunity that presented itself in front of them. Well, they lack the mindset it takes to look at things the right way, or I should say, the way that will make your life right.

In a nutshell, prolonged exposure to depression, stress, and living an unsuccessful life is a byproduct of the wrong mindset. And, living a happy, blissful, and successful life is simply a byproduct of the right mindset, aka the success mindset. Plain and simple.

 

Success Mindset #3: Add a Pinch of Creativity in your Everyday Life

Creativity here doesn’t just stop at your eighth-grade science fair project or a beautiful piece of art you drew. Creativity can and should be mixed with day-to-day activities. Only the rarest of rare people actually understand the whole dynamics of this scenario. So by integrating creativity in daily life problems, what do I actually mean?

Well, it’s simple. 

It involves looking at the problems you face under a new shade of light and handling it in the most efficient and effortless manner that proves to be the most beneficial to you. But the majority of us are simply gonna skip the whole process and are gonna blatantly copy what the rest of the world is doing, just because it’s less of a pain. We simply let our minds rust and rot by not using it when required. And this is not living a creative life. Simply following the footsteps of others, tracing the old paths, and not making your own unique route is another way of living a half-life, a not so thrilling and fulfilling one.

If you face any issue, then instead of solving it the same way you have been solving it, you gotta bring in your creative guns. It’s not a tip, it’s a prescription. The issues are evolving and becoming better and more complex with time, but our problem-solving capacity is somewhat stagnant. The end result being our problems and challenges outperforming us.

It’s high time we tie up our laces and turn those creativity boosters on or we are gonna lose this race to the modern hardships that are circling us. The world is changing at a lightning speed, the old is getting ancient and is regressing into obsolete in a snap of the fingers. New variables are constantly getting introduced in this equation of life. One needs to be hypervigilant and superactive to keep up with this ever-changing flux.

That’s what successful people understand very well. They aren’t mechanical, they don’t figure out how to solve the next-gen problems on the basis of how they solved the previous-gen issues. If they go about the mechanical way, they are likely to get stuck, because the problem isn’t the same anymore as it used to be. So, it doesn’t make any sense to apply the same old mundane solution to a problem that has changed. 

Common sense, still, not common practice.

 

Success Mindset #4: Break your Old Thinking Pattern

It’s the need of the hour. 

We are not used to changes, be it external or internal. For once, one might chew the changes occurring in the outside environment, but under little to no circumstances do we ever wanna change our internal environment. By ‘internal environment’, I mean the thought patterns you have fostered, the beliefs you have adopted, the ideologies you have accepted, and the tenets you follow.

What we need in today’s world is not someone who so dearly clings onto his old and outdated notions about the world, but someone who’s ever ready to break the old chain and form a new one by grasping and evaluating the modern-day situation, without giving it a minute’s thought. Ok, maybe it will take more than a minute, but you got the point.

This is the new thinking guys, this is where the money is. And this is what differentiates the success mindset from an average mindset.

The unsuccessful people wanna comfortably revolve in a set pattern and don’t really want to apply those big brains of theirs to any good use. They are happy to keep it running on autopilot. On the other hand, the successful people’s only pattern is that they don’t have any. They know very well that forming a pattern and acting according to it will become their biggest impediment to thinking innovatively, creatively, and independently. 

 

Success Mindset #5: It’s Ok to Say “I don’t know”

Another major distinction is how you respond to things you have no idea about. The stale mindset will either not accept that there is something that it doesn’t know, or it will simply say that “I don’t need to know.” And that is the end of it. The success mindset, on the other hand, is the humble kind. It knows very well that there are a ton of things yet to be figured out and that’s okay. 

Saying “I don’t know”, is merely their starting move to get going and figure out the path from not knowing to knowing. People who embrace this mindset aren’t ashamed or embarrassed about it, instead, they are nothing but excited to add another feather on their cap as soon as possible.  

They will ask a ton of questions to direct their focus on the underlying problem. And instead of running away from it like a coward, they face the challenge head-on.

The people who reject this hypothesis simply have their egos so inflated that it is bound to burst, taking them down along the way. Those kinds of people will never be able to come out of the cage they have created for themselves and will rot in there for their entire lives, and they wouldn’t even know about it.

 

Success Mindset #6: Don’t let the External Circumstances shake your Internal Foundations

This is perhaps the golden mindset rule, the one that differentiates the majority of successful from unsuccessful ones.

Let’s take two students who went to college together. They were mediocre in studies, neither too geeky nor total nincompoops. After their long hard battle of 4 years, they finally graduated, only to find out that they didn’t get their dream jobs. Let’s say there was a recession going on as the economy blew belly up, the companies weren’t exactly lining up to hire new talent, and they both, as a result, got pretty badly screwed by it. 

Now, one of them, who is prey to the typical average mindset, already labeled himself as a failure. “Wasted my precious 4 years, wasted my parent’s money, and wasted an opportunity to make something great of myself”, this is what is swirling in his mind. 

As a result, he is ready to take even the worst of jobs to simply get by through life. In totality, he’s stuck at a job he hates, he is bound to live frugally, his own friends and families keep on reminding him of what kind of a loser he is, even his own thoughts are cornering him, and he keeps on going down and down into the abyss. All thanks to his mindset.

While the other guy had openly welcomed the ‘success mindset’. His first reaction to not being able to secure his dream job was a bit unorthodox and some might even call it a tad crazy. Instead of outrightly considering himself a loser, he rejoiced. It became pretty clear to him that maybe he is not cut out for a job, and perhaps the only option left for him was to make something of his own. That’s a pretty big thing in itself.

He is of the mindset that if he spent his 4 years in college, he learned something or the other of value that he can leverage at a later point in life. There’s nothing that you did in the past from which you cannot learn something or the other. There’s always something of value in whatever you did in your life.

 

Nothing is Ever Truly Wasted

The problem is, we already set a huge grandeur picture in our petty little brains, fantasizing that “If I do x,y,z thing, then l,m,n should be the return, otherwise it’s all a waste.” This is being narrow-minded and thinking mechanically in an already set loop.

That’s the issue here. I have given the example of a college, but you can put in any other example related to your life as well. It could be that of a relationship where you invested a great deal of time, going against everybody (just to add a dramatic flair), only to see a disgustful end to that chapter. So, now you can either act with an average mindset or with a success mindset, as per the example I was citing. 

Ok, so back to the second kid. He started looking for opportunities, the holes he can fill, the problems he can solve. The kind of challenges he himself faced. And that’s where a true entrepreneur takes birth, by setting out to solve problems faced by him, and not scanning through the internet looking for some crazy-ass idea. Nobody can solve the problems that you faced, experienced, and went through personally, better than you yourself.

That’s how any simple person becomes successful. These are the stepping stones one needs to cross.

Now, whether he excels in doing something or not, is another topic. But what’s important to note is the way they both approached the exact same situation in two entirely different ways, simply on the basis of their mindset. One of them is stuck and stagnant, while the other one is constantly evolving and learning and growing.

Potato or Coffee Beans

A potato, though hard and rigid, when dipped in boiling water, becomes soggy and soft, loosening its hardness. While, coffee beans on the other hand, when mixed with boiling water, ultimately end up leaving the whole environment in a better off position than before. 

That’s the key difference. Average mindset will make you a potato. When the external situations will come banging on your door, your poor little mindset will not only let them in but will help rob your house with them. They will leave you crippled and broke from the inside. Your external circumstances will make you kneel in front of them to accept the defeat.

While honing a success mindset, will transform you into coffee beans. Not only will you be able to face those challenges in a sporting manner, but you will also have the power to change their direction in their entirety. That’s the real kicker boys and girls. Make it this way, so that you have the power to turn the tables in your favor.

 

Success Mindset #7: The Only Thing to say to Problems: “Is that all you got?”

And last but not the least, the way you keep your success mindset factory up and running is by feeding it with problems, a ton of them.

An average mindset will look for ways to avoid problems at all costs. They will pray, negotiate, trade-off, pawn off, whatever they can to evade troubles and challenges and that’s what explains their ‘living in a shithole” situation. A problem or a challenge is to a mindset what a whetstone is to swords. If you gotta sharpen your mental muscles, improve it, upgrade it, then you gotta lift the dumbbells of ‘challenges and hardships.’ There is no other way.

And the successful people know it very well. They don’t stay away from it, they embrace it wholeheartedly. They will never shy away from facing a freshly produced problem because that’s their source of energy. 

The average mindset will scare you, intimidate you, doubt you, second guess you; ultimately making you so terrified to not letting you touch problems with a ten feet pole. And your very trying to steer away from problems will become the crux of all your problems in life.

And guess what, creativity comes from being fearless of anything and everything. Where there is fear, there can’t be any creativity. 

 

Success Mindset #8: Embrace Instability to Be Stable

If you wanna think in terms of ‘safety’ and ‘security’, then the average mindset will be your ally. But if you wanna think in terms of ‘living your life to the fullest’ and ‘surging past your own biggest expectations’, then the success mindset is for you.

The whole world is chasing the likes of getting secured somehow or the other. Getting secured from what in God’s green earth? Secured from failures? From challenges? Assholes! It is this kind of lame and orthodox way of living that’s actually killing us. Beware of this thinking, it’s fatal.

All unsuccessful people want to be safe and secured, and they will spend their dying breath trying to be those but still failing to achieve either one of them. The people who chase stability are the most unstable people in the world.

The only way to actually live a stable, secured life is to look and accept the uncertainties all around the world, understand and analyze them, and constantly keep on evolving and advancing yourself into the unknown. The faster you are ready to change yourself as per your underlying situations, the better off you are gonna be.

 

 

The only stable thing in this world is instability. Come out of this race of becoming ‘stable’ one day.