Why Many People Don't Want To Be Successful

Why Many People Don't Want To Be Successful
The process of success and success itself bring with them a relentless responsibility,
which not everyone can handle.

Yes, you read it right. There are many people in this world who do not want to be successful. Now, this is not the same as not having the desire to be successful. Everybody in this world desires to be successful, but not everyone chooses to be successful. Desire and want are two different aspects, just as my favourite theory that comfort and success are not equal to each other. The interpretation of words has a major impact on how we shape our understanding, and thereby our destiny.

The reason somebody can have the desire for success but not the want is that success comes with a price, and it creates expectations. Successful people face a perennial problem which the unsuccessful ones don't have to, and that is, they have to sustain and expand that success. It is not an easy paradigm to deal with. Both the process of becoming successful in something and then working towards sustaining plus raising the bar demand a price which is both undefined and unquantifiable. Many people early in their journey realise this and block their due in life – in many instances unconsciously -- because they lack the emotional and mental bandwidth to continuously pay the price. Somewhere along the line, they just hope that success will one fine day arrive at their doorstep, and they will not even have to pay the price. They just hope that success will arrive automatically. But then unfortunately it doesn't work that way.

A key difference of course lies in the fact that the process of success and success itself bring with them a certain responsibility which not everyone can handle. Besides, it is a relentless responsibility. Once you get to something in life which is deemed as success, the responsibility to live up to it can be overwhelming for many. That is why many people, after having attained a certain level of success, come crashing down. Only those who are able to take responsibility for their situation, plus are ready to continuously reinvent themselves can rise again, and keep rising. They are the ones who believe that you are only as good or bad as your last performance – success is just that, what you achieved yesterday. Today is a new day, and it calls for a fresh effort, with no guarantees of yesterday's conditions remaining the same.

In many ways, the right question is not what needs to be done to be successful? Rather, the right question should be, what should not be done which will block our success? Here are a few pointers:

1. Don't hope for success, rather, work for success.
2. Don't shy away from the price of success, rather, be ready to pay it continuously.
3. Don't give up because it is painful, rather, persist and become pain-resistant, for only pain produces performance.
4. Don't blame it on bad luck if you don't make it, rather, create your own luck by persisting till you make it, and keep persisting to grow even more.
5. Don't have a bad attitude, rather, work rigorously on building the right attitude
6. Don't think it is too late, rather, it is never too early or too late to start.
7. Don't expect people to support you in your journey, rather, expect more brickbats than bouquets for your courage to pursue your dreams, even from those who matter a lot to you in your life.
8. Don't be in your comfort zone, rather, get out of it and take calculated risks. Not taking any risk is the greatest risk of all.
9. Don't just have desire, rather, have BURNING DESIRE. It is not good enough to just have desire. What separates the extraordinary from the ordinary is the extra word: Burning.
10. Don't be deluded that success is just about attitude, rather, it is a recognition which is given to us by others. Attitude is in the inside, but success is in the outside, for it is relative.

The tenth point is a very important one. We can't declare ourselves to be successful. That is done by others. The world decides whether we are successful or not. This means there is a waiting game which every success aspiring person has to go through, and naturally, he or she has to compete for that recognition in the marketplace. This calls for huge amounts of patience and persistence, with no guarantees of that recognition coming our way in our lifetime. That's why the success path requires a lot of courage. For many people, their life ends with a gap between effort and recognition. But, somewhere you have to believe life evens it out in its own unique way.

Similar to the topic of this piece, the other important questions could be: Why leaders fail? Why salespeople fail? Why relationships fail? I am reading this amazing book by Marshall Goldsmith titled, `What got You Here Won't Get You There`, and he quotes the great Peter Drucker as having said: “We spend a lot of time teaching leaders what to do. We don't spend enough time teaching leaders what to stop. Half the leaders I have met don't need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop.” -- (Chapter: The Twenty Habits).

Needless to say, the inspiration to write this piece has come from Marshall Goldsmith's book. Come to think of it, if habit formation be considered as a key component of success, how critical is it to stop our bad habits than simply create healthy ones? For healthy ones to take shape, the unhealthy ones have to be weeded out; otherwise, how do you make space for the healthy ones? Sometimes, an overdose of positivity without a realistic self assessment works as a roadblock to success. An ability to look in the mirror and acknowledge one's life's realities is an extremely commendable quality.

But how does one really define success? There is really only one definition: Success is a journey, not a destination – of which failure is an integral part. If you can't take failures in your stride and learn from them, you cannot deserve success. The beauty of success lies in the journey, a never ending journey, rather than in achieving a so called destination. Those who stop are not missing out on the real or imagined fruits, they are simply missing out on the romance of the journey. If you stay on the journey, you are successful.

Before I end, a strong recommendation. The best book I have read on success is `Think And Grow Rich`, by the great Napoleon Hill. It is an ultimate treatise on success. Don't miss laying your hands on it and reading it.