This article explores the fundamental and universal practical steps you must take to succeed in life. If you have not yet read “The Mentality of Success: Why Only a Few People Succeed,” here: https://aibiedaily.com/why-most-people-fail-and-only-a-few-succeed/ it is highly recommended that you do so first, as it provides the essential foundation for everything discussed here.

The steps outlined in this guide are carefully structured to challenge your thinking, inspire self-reflection, and push you toward making meaningful changes. By applying these principles consistently, you can position yourself to achieve the level of success you truly desire in life. You can access the part two of this article here https://aibiedaily.com/how-to-succeed-in-life-part-two/

1. FOCUS ON WHAT YOU CAN DO BEST

Success in life depends more on the realization of purpose than on hard work  (DISCOVER YOUR TALENT)

You are capable of doing something better than the next ten thousand people.

We are all created by God; we have equal value in His eyes, but we do not have the same gifts. Your gift is your talent, your talent is your strength zone, and your strength zone is that area of human endeavour in which your natural ability is high compared to other areas.

Your natural ability is your inborn ability, not the one you acquire through practice. Dr. John Maxwell writes, “It has been my observation that people can only increase their ability in an area by only 2 points on a scale of 1–10.” For example, if your natural strength in a field is 4, with hard work you may raise it to 6, but let’s say you find a field in which your natural strength is 7, you have the potential to become a 9, maybe even a 10.

Learn to choose your career based on your area of strength. Doing what you are not naturally meant to do is like forcing a square peg into a round hole.

Those we call “gifted” or “genius” are those who discover and develop their talent.

Some people are naturally good at painting, others are good at teaching, others are good at managing, others are good at writing, others are good at drawing, etc. The key to talent discovery is your passion; “passion is intense emotional excitement. It is a feeling that comes to those who feel intensely about some object, person, ideal, belief, or career.”

With a higher degree of possibility, your talent is what you love to do when no one motivates you, supervises you, challenges you, or rewards you; you do it simply because you love to do it. It is certain that when we do what we love to do, we get good at it.

Rick Warren, in his book The Purpose Driven Life, wrote, “The highest achievers in any field are those who do it because of passion, not duty or profit.” Nancy Anderson added that “every major change in history—social, economic, philosophical, or artistic—came about because of the participation of passionate individuals.”

You have talent and you can develop it.

It does not matter how aware you are of your abilities, how you feel about yourself, or whether you have previously achieved success or not. What is important is that you have talent, and you can discover and develop it.

Please note, you can only develop the talent you have, not the one you want. In other words, you cannot choose your talent; you can only discover it. You are not a plain piece of paper on which you can just pick up a pen and draw anything you want and call it your purpose or talent. You have a natural pattern and framework that must be followed if you want to make the most of your life.

However, it is important to know that talent alone does not guarantee success. It takes more than talent to succeed in life; your talent is just a starting point. Someone said talent is cheaper than table salt, but hard work is what separates the talented from the successful. Late Michael Jackson was a talented dancer, yet he spent almost eight hours daily rehearsing.

2. LIVE TO SUCCEED AND DON’T SETTLE FOR ANYTHING ELSE

You must be determined if you really want to succeed. No one has ever succeeded without commitment and discipline. (BE DETERMIND)

Determination is the raw material for success; success is the product of determination.

You don’t have to plan to fail in life. Lack of determination to succeed is the master plan for becoming a successful failure in life. The undetermined person fails to do what he is supposed to do because of one excuse or the other, and his biography is full of excuses on why he failed in life. The determined individual did what he had to do amidst obvious setbacks, and his biography is more about how he endured, overcame obstacles, and succeeded. A proverb in Hausa language says, “Da kyar a tsira ya fi da kyar aka kama ni” (It was difficult, but I escaped is better than they suffered before they caught me).

No excuse justifies failure in life.

History holds that almost all successful people have had reasonable excuses not to keep striving to succeed, but they succeeded because they refused to allow those excuses to stop them from reaching their target. It is true that if the heart is willing, it finds a thousand ways. If it is not willing, it finds thousands of excuses.

Do what you are supposed to do no matter how, no matter what the circumstances may be, and by all positive means, do what is necessary for success to be achieved. I am not trying to argue in favor of a do-or-die selfish struggle to succeed. No, far from it; I am talking about the inner resolution to stay focused on your goal irrespective of peer pressure and unfavorable circumstances.

Put your feet down where you mean to stand and let no man shift you.

He that always gives way to others will end up having no principles of his own. Take a definite stand, ignore transient and momentary pleasures that shift you away from your stand to achieve greatness. Ignore peer pressure and irrational behavior associated with myopic thinking. Stand out from the crowd, be yourself, and go ahead to achieve that which you want to achieve in life, even if it means sailing against the wind of the status quo, friends, or environment. Be prepared to walk down the lonely road, for the road that leads to success is always lonely.

Smile and say thank you when people support you, but the major support you need comes from within. Don’t make the mistake of expecting public approval to feed your determination, because it might starve to death.

Certainly, not all your experiences will support your ambition. Not all people will agree with you, and not all the resources you need will be at your disposal, but in spite of all these, you have to take a step and keep moving toward success and success alone.

Anaïs Nin said, “Life shrinks and expands in proportion to one’s courage; regret looks back, worry looks around, and vision looks up; keep seeing where you are going.”

3. TURN EVERYTHING YOU SEE OR HEAR OVER AND OVER AGAIN UNTIL SOMETHING GOOD AND TANGIBLE EMERGES

No one commits greater foolishness than he who sits and waits for someone to come along and give him a lift to success. (BE CREATIVE)

You will never succeed if all you do is sit and wait for someone to carry you along to success.

Napoleon Hill said, “Depending on somebody is another cause of people’s poverty in nature, because no man has found himself satisfied with what he has, and how do you expect a dependent to find success in life? You that position yourself as a dependent, I want you to stand up and work for your success and progress.”

All innovations, structures, and services are products of people’s thoughts and actions. Sit and think of what to do; trust me, you cannot do everything, but certainly you can do something, and it is a tragedy if you do not figure out and do that which you can do. The world awaits your ideas, inventions, products, or services. The mind is like an orange; it stores a sweet juice that no one will benefit from except the one who squeezes it. Think and think and think until something good shows up.

An idea produced should not be ignored, no matter how small it is; it might be ten times better than hundreds of big ideas introduced to you by someone else.

“A man should learn to detect that gleam of light that flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament from bards and sages.” Often, we tend to abandon the ideas we produce because they do not seem worthwhile at first sight, just as you cannot tell the exact taste of food by merely looking at it. A lot of ideas, because they are new and unfamiliar, seem strange and worthless, but with time they might become clearly great. To become a creative thinker, you must have an optimistic attitude toward ideas and try not to condemn them even when others do.

William Shakespeare said, “Cherish your vision and your dreams as they are the offspring of your soul, the blueprint of your ultimate achievement.”

Every mind is creative, but until you activate and engage it on a quest for something, it will never create.

Extraordinary things are derived from ordinary things that are visible for all to see, but only those who look creatively can see something that no man has ever seen. Isaac Newton saw an apple falling down from a tree, and he discovered it was as a result of something he later called “gravity.” No mind is void of creative strength; every mind is a potential creator of something useful and unique, but we have to take control of our thoughts and engage our minds in an exclusive search for useful things.

A reminder worth mentioning is this: please always note that successful people do not waste time in unproductive, catastrophic, or erotic thoughts; they think creatively. Leonardo da Vinci said, “Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so, inaction saps the vigor of the mind.” An idle mind is never static; it keeps depreciating like a burning candle.

Look for good in unexpected sources; use unwelcome tokens of personal misery as stepping stones to achieve greatness.

It is not what happens to you that matters; what matters most is how you handle it. The same obstacles that cause others to give up make others more determined to achieve their objectives. Tom Hopkins observed that “the single most important difference between champion achievers and average people is their ability to handle rejection and failure.”

Oswald Avery advised that, “Whenever you fall, pick something up”; that is creativity.

Stephen Covey said, “Show me one who is humble enough to accept and take responsibility for his or her circumstances and courageous enough to take whatever initiative is necessary to creatively work his or her way through and around those challenges, and I will show you the supreme power of choice.”

4. BELIEVE AND HAVE CONFIDENCE IN YOURSELF

You are not doing the best you can do, whatever you are doing, no matter how you are doing it, if you don’t believe in and have confidence in yourself. (BELIEVE IN YOURSELF)

You have to believe you can be what you want to be before you can confidently work on how to be what you want to be.

Lack of confidence has produced more failures than inability. If you don’t believe in yourself and respect your own opinion, you will end up living to please everyone. One wrong look or critical word will make you feel worthless. Until you believe in and have confidence in yourself, you will experience a drastic fall in motivation and the strength needed to achieve what you want in life.

How you see yourself is important because it reflects on how others see you. Always remember that you are training others on how to treat you by how you treat yourself.

No one will believe in you without you first believing in yourself. People fail to believe in themselves because they think they are inferior, but in reality, there is no inferior human being on earth except those who think they are (inferiority is a state of the mind). Some people assume others are superior to them, probably because of the abilities they have seen them exhibit or the successes they have seen them achieve. Those you think are superior to you most likely utilize their time, mind, and strength appropriately to do productive things. The good news is you can be like them in your own way if you do the same.

Don’t attach too much importance to what you are not, as if it is all you need to become who you want to become, and don’t criticize who you really are as if it is what hinders you from becoming who you want to become in life.

You can’t change who you are. Constantly regretting who you are not and what you don’t have will never get you anywhere in life. It is not who you are that holds you back; it is the constant thought and regret of who you are not that can hold you back. I advise you to make a list of the good qualities and abilities you possess, appreciate God for them, and improve them day by day. The greatest obstacle is not who you are not, but failure to celebrate who you are.

How well fitted you are in what you are doing as a profession determines, to some extent, how you feel about yourself.

People feel inferior because they are not naturally fitted into what they are doing. Imagine the feeling and excelling possibilities of an introvert personality as a commentator. Channel your effort to succeed in life based on your natural ability. Place yourself in positions where you are best fitted naturally. Lucille Ball said, “I think knowing what you cannot do is more important than knowing what you can do.” A car does not move in water, neither does a ship move on land. The uniqueness in you can only manifest if you discover and focus on what you can do best.

Never use society or your family’s success limit as a yardstick with which you measure what you are worth or what you can be.

History is never a barrier to future breakthrough. John Grogan said, “The reason why most people get little out of life is because they don’t expect very much.” Dream big and go as far as you desire. History has never and will never determine the future; in fact, history is there so that we do not repeat it. Abraham Lincoln said, “I don’t know who my grandfather was, but I am much more concerned with what his grandson will be.” Forget about who your father or grandfather was; concentrate on what you can be. A popular adage says, “No matter how tall your grandfather was, you have to do your own growing.” Blessing Gram said, “Go farther. Don’t try to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors; try to be better than yourself.”

You may succeed if nobody else believes in you, but you will never succeed if you don’t believe in yourself.

Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Every man must do two things alone… he must do his own believing and his own dying.” Believe in yourself and have confidence in the abilities you possess. By so doing, you can passionately and confidently make a successful effort to be what you want to be. No branch of a tree has ever grown too big for the trunk to carry. Whatever your mind can conceive and believe, definitely you can achieve, provided you are willing to pay the price.

Everyone is supposed to be himself. Think of why God made a monkey a monkey and a gorilla a gorilla, even though they look alike.

It is unfortunate that some people believe in others and fail to believe in themselves. They want to be like somebody else in life, ignoring what they can be. Wanting to be somebody else is the beginning of a journey to a destination that never exists. Just as nobody can be you, you also cannot be anybody else. In essence, only you can be you. Be yourself and believe in yourself; beyond the sky is your limit. After all, if you can’t be you, who else can you be?

Samuel Johnson said, “Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.” If you are not yourself and you are not the person you want to resemble, then who are you? It is better to fail in originality and try again than to claim success in imitation.

5. MAKE YOUR ACTIVITIES PURPOSEFUL

“If we don’t set goals that can get us to our predetermined target, we begin to mistake activity for achievement.” — John Grogan (SET GOALS)

Motion can only be differentiated from progress when goals are set.

If you don’t set goals, you might be claiming progress when you are actually wandering in the same position. Do not forget that rotation from a position back to the same position without achieving anything is equal to zero. Freedom fighters fight for freedom, boxers box for medals—what about you? What are you presently working to achieve? What are you living your life for?

Imagine what footballers would be playing for if the goalpost was removed from the football pitch.

Goals generate commitment. Our identity and value in life come out of what we are committed to.

When the name Bill Gates is mentioned, what comes to your mind first is software. When Michael Jordan is mentioned, what comes to your mind is basketball. When Aliko Dangote is mentioned, what comes to your mind is business. When Lionel Messi is mentioned, what comes to your mind is football.

That is the way it is; all great men are committed to something in such a way that even their names are synonymous with that which they are committed to. They have discovered the truth that life is not worth living until you discover something worth losing that life for.

If you don’t have something you can direct your activity toward achieving, you are not too different from a dead man.

During my primary school days, a teacher of mine always asked this question: “Where is this world taking us to?” This question baffled me a lot and made me believe that the world is nothing but a factory of uncertainty. I was convinced that everything that came out of the world was never expected.

But today, I wish I could locate my teacher and tell him that I found a simple answer to his then-rhetorical question. I wish I could tell him that this world is taking you exactly where you want to be.

Perhaps, if I were someone’s teacher today, I would ask my students this question: “Where do you want to be in this world?”

There is a proverbial story of an old man who was seated at a junction where two footpaths met and was approached by a stranger who asked him, pointing at one of the roads, “Please, where does this road lead to?”

“Where are you going?” the old man asked.

“I don’t know,” the stranger replied.

“Then it makes no difference which way you take,” replied the old man.

Until you decide where you want to be in life, nothing works for you or against you because no wind blows in favor of a ship without a destination. Without goals, activity might address our idleness, but it cannot take care of our emptiness. Lewis Sperry Chafer once said, “Most of our activities are little more like a cheap anaesthetic to deaden the pain of an empty life.”

Lack of goals multiplies your focus and makes you live for everything without concentrating on something.

William Matthews said, “The first law of success is concentration… bending all the energy to one point and going directly to it, looking neither to the right nor to the left.”

A young hunter was about to shoot a bird that was resting on a tree with both eyes open when the master asked, “What can you see?”

“I see the bird, the sky, and the tree,” the young boy answered.

Then the master said, “Close one of your eyes and aim not at the whole bird but at the exact spot you intend to hit.”

The boy did as the master had instructed.

The master asked again, “Can you see the bird?”

“No, I can only see its head,” the boy replied.

“Now you can pull the trigger,” replied the master.

When you aim at everything, it means you aim at nothing, and when you aim at nothing, you are more likely to achieve nothing. “Great dreams are often far away from your reach that you become discouraged, but each small goal set and achieved gives you confidence to try the next.” — John H. Johnson

The moon moves slowly, but by daybreak it has crossed the sky.

Every great man has a little beginning. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said, “Most of us would succeed in small things if we were not so troubled with blind ambition.”

The drive to be bigger can stress you and stop you from enjoying what you already have. A mountain climber doesn’t go right to the top, but little by little, he eventually reaches the top. Peace of mind and inner stability come only from gradual success, and it is more valuable and lasting.

6. DEVICE WAYS TO ACHIEVE YOUR GOALS

He who fails to plan has planned to fail. (DESIGN A PLAN)

Plan your way to success in life; those who experience failure in life rarely get a second chance.

Where goals are set, plans on how to achieve these goals must be accurately designed, and failure to design a plan automatically transfers these set goals to the hands of luck, chance, or coincidence. This leads to the loss of accountability, and where accountability is lost, the end result is based on probability.

Effort to succeed in life should be given a point-blank approach. A point-blank approach is the type of approach that leaves nothing to chance; everything is well planned from the beginning to the end. Strategize your way to success; make a list of what you want to achieve and how to achieve it.

Planning to succeed is designing and taking steps in your imagination to see how your intended actions will look in due time in order to avoid a blind practical approach to success. Imagine the consequences of your intended actions before taking them.

Planning and success go hand in hand. He who plans is bound to succeed, and he who fails to plan has planned to fail.

As long as success remains your target, planning is a necessity in your life. No step in life is unnecessary, but each step taken has positive and negative consequences, and consequences can only be delayed, not escaped. The consequence of failing to plan is failure.

No true success is void of details leading to that success; if you get the details right, the conclusion can never be wrong. Success does not stand on nothing; it is not created in a vacuum. Whenever success is achieved, there are processes leading to its achievement. So until you strategize your moves to achieve the success you desire, you may never succeed.

Make planning a habit, and success will be your companion sooner or later.

The following questions help if you can find honest answers to them:

• What do I want to be in life?
• How can I be it?
• When do I want to be it?
• Why do I want to be it?

7. DO AWAY WITH THE HABIT OF ALWAYS PLANNING, NEVER ACTING

Procrastination is the ditch where the successes of most failures are drowned. (AVOID PROCRASTINATION)

Every purpose is purposeless unless it is executed.

The successful world is full of doers; no intender is present. A lot of people intend to do something, but only those who act out their intentions are recognized and rewarded. You are a living witness that no medal has ever been awarded to anyone for his intention to win a race.

George S. Patton said, “A good plan violently executed right now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.” Often, it is not the surgery that kills the patient but delayed surgery.

The door of opportunity won’t open unless you push it.

You will never hit a target if all you do is aim and aim without pulling the trigger. Mike Murdock stated, “You have no right to anything you have not pursued.” Unless you go after something, there is no possibility of you having it.

By the street of “by and by,” one arrives at the house of never.

You will never be successful if you are forever putting things off, if you take too much time making up your mind about taking action and seizing opportunity. Jimmy Lyons said, “Tomorrow is the only day that appeals to a lazy man.”

Do it today, no matter how little you can do. Edmund Burke said, “No one makes greater mistakes than he who did nothing because he could only do little.”

Helen Keller confessed, “I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.”

Be willing to take action without benefits at hand.

Benefits are the reaction to your actions. Jonathan Winters said, “I couldn’t wait for success, so I went ahead without it.” You might not be what you ought to be until you start what you ought to be doing. George Eliot said, “The difficulties and struggles of today are but the price we must pay for the accomplishments and victories of tomorrow.”

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago; the second best time is today. I cherish little acts done toward the actualization of small dreams more than the idea of a great dream with no trace of action to back it up.

Nothing happens until you quit holding back, until you quit waiting for everything to be perfect, and stop waiting until your fear subsides.

A lot of people hesitate to act because they are waiting for the perfect condition. Horatio Dresser said, “The ideal never comes; today is the ideal for him who makes it so.”

Your perfect condition is whenever the need to take action arises. In case you think conditions will later improve, then let them improve while you are acting. Trust me, as you start taking action, certain things will become clearer and easier for you.

Norman Vincent Peale said, “Action is a great restorer and builder of confidence. Inaction is not only the result, but the cause, of fear.” Perhaps the action you take will be successful; perhaps different actions will have to follow, but any action is better than no action at all.

Seneca urges us to “Admit that it is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult.”

It is therefore better to be eighty percent sure and start than to wait until you are one hundred percent sure, because by then opportunity may have passed you by.