How to be successful

Ahh, success. Intangible; elusive; smells like a choc-cinnamon Pop-Tart. What is it, and how do you get it? Good question. Here is my attempt to answer it.

I don’t want to make any big statements here, but I think I might know the secret of success. It doesn’t involve great wads of cash or a motivational seminar. It doesn’t require sweet-talking any bigwigs or going for a roll on the casting couch. So, are you ready? Here it is:

Do stuff.

That’s it. Here endeth the sermon.

Well, okay. I’ll explain it a bit.

All around you are people who talk about doing things. They detail their plans for writing an epic screenplay. They speak about climbing Kilimanjaro or running a marathon or ditching their corporate cages to start their own business. But how many of them actually do this stuff?

Success is about the follow-through. It’s about doing the things you say you’ll do. It’s about keeping the promises you make — to yourself and others. But the crucial part is the doing. Woody Allen was right: 80 per cent of success is showing up.

Doing stuff feels amazing. The catch is that there is often a hefty chunk of fear involved. I talked about launching a blog for about six months before I actually did it. Every time I got close, I would wuss out. “What if the mean internet people are mean to me?” I would think. “What if I’m not as interesting as I thought? What if no-one reads my posts?”

On the day I published Sprinkle of Ginger, I felt this huge sense of accomplishment. And that was before anyone had visited the site. I felt successful, because I had done that scary thing that I had been putting off for so long. Whether anyone read it was a secondary concern. (Which is not to say that I don’t care about such things. Please read my blog. I like you.)

The word “success” is a little bit Donald Trumpesque. A tad Tiger Woodsy. But it doesn’t have to be that limited. Success means achieving your purpose; attaining the ability to do what makes you happy on a daily basis. It comes in many forms. You are probably already “a success” in several areas. Here’s how to recognise your achievements and strive for more.

• Redefine “success”. When I was on a trip to London, right in the middle of my pansy-pantsed “Should I really quit my job and run off to New York?” phase, I had a most enlightening conversation with someone I had just met. I set out my quandary for him: I loved writing and performing, and wanted to study acting and improv. But that didn’t seem like a legitimate option. What if I failed and embarrassed myself? What if I didn’t succeed?

  He asked me what “success” meant. I said that I’d feel successful if I was doing what I wanted to do. And that was writing and performing in New York. So, by that reasoning, he continued, the very act of moving to the US and picking up a pen would constitute a “success”. Holy revelation, Batman! My mind was blown.

• Stop comparing others’ achievements to yours. I used to have a strange view of all this: I imagined that there was a finite number of “success points”. If someone in my circle scored a great job or a sweet lifestyle upgrade, I’d assume that there’d be less left for me. It was as though they had taken a bucket and scooped up a pile of sand from my weeny little sandcastle to install a few extra turrets in theirs.
  
  This kind of thinking made me bitter. Thankfully, I came to realise that it was totally nutso. Other people’s successes are not detrimental to your own. They may make you feel a little jealous, but you can turn that jealousy into something positive. Look at why you’re envious — it’s almost always because you are annoyed at yourself for not chasing the opportunities that have come their way. Now’s the time to get on that.
• Find out what matters to you and chase it. So you don’t give a toss about your current job. Well, what do you care about? Write a list entitled “Things I’d like to spend my life doing”. Then start incorporating those things into your daily routine as much as possible.
• Keep a sense of humour about fancy job titles. They rarely correlate with levels of competence. Anyone can slap a highfalutin role name on a business card and print up a batch on demand. For example, I’m the CEO of Sprinkle of Ginger*. I manage a team of two**. I am a social media expert*** and a digital pioneer****.
  
  ^{*I started a Wordpress blog.
  **I made my sister design the site’s header image, and my mum took one of the photos I used in an early blog post.
  ***Much of my day is wasted on Twitter and Facebook.
  ****When I was 13 I made a website on Geocities.}