SUCCESS SPECIAL .....The signs of success

The signs of success

They may not look like major achievements, but these traits are indicators of a rising star

Success isn’t just about money, power, and fame. We often tend to underestimate ourselves when we look at highly successful people or people with billions of dollars in the bank. However, personal fulfillment and making an impact count for something, too. If you’re pursuing your passions, if you’re learning, and if you’re forging solid relationships, you’re probably on track to do great things. Here are a series of signs — based on research and expert opinion — that you’re doing better in life than you’d be inclined to believe:

You are selfcompassionate

Self-compassion doesn’t make you weak or unambitious. Instead, scientists say it can make you more successful. Research on self-compassion suggests that it has three components — engaging in a positive internal dialogue, understanding that everyone makes mistakes, and being aware of your thoughts and feelings without succumbing to them. A strategy for practising self-compassion is treating yourself as you would treat a colleague or friend who has failed.

You make time every day to learn something new

You should be allotting some of your time to reading or research — something that expands your horizons. Devote 10 per cent of every workday to learn something new. Make room for discovery.

You are willing to take calculated risks

You would be hard-pressed to find a successful person who hasn’t taken some amount of risk in their career. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and the richest man in the world, has spoken about how he decides which risks to pursue.

In one interview, Bezos explained how he founded Amazon: “I knew that when I was 80, I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that.

But I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day.”

You are open to failure

In his book, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, Scott Galloway shows how some of the biggest successes in tech have also had major public failures. He explains why failure is an important aspect of success. The tech titans are all open to occasional failures, it means they’re trying something new. If you are not getting knocked off every once in a while, you aren’t trying hard enough.

You’re always looking for a better way to do things

Are you stuck in the past — or hurtling towards the future? Success is largely about the willingness to solve a problem in a way that’s never been solved before. The opposite trait — resistance to change — can stall your career, the same way it stalls big companies’ progress.

Galloway explains, “Trying to resist this tide of change will drown you. Successful people in the digital age are those who go to work every day, not dreading the net change, but asking: ‘What if we did it this way?’”.

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