Jun P. Espina 5 min read
Updated on October 10th, 2022
Succeed in Life by Understanding Its Principles
Do you want to succeed in life—I mean, really succeed in life? If so, always keep in your mind that you will have a long journey to the city of Success. You will travel across thousands of miles before you can get there. As it is located so far away from your abode, you will spend the rest of your life journeying, always keeping up with the many routines. Only a very few people would give their all on this journey. Once their comfort zones are drawn, some joiners of this life challenge won’t go on any further. Columbus didn’t just sail; rather, he sailed west. To succeed in life is to stick to the goal at all costs; the very key to an achievement that the quitters and failures in our midst don’t possess.
Remember that success obeys certain principles. It is a formula you need to just copy and apply. Succeed in life the righteous way—the happy way!
Success Is a Journey
This is one extremely important lesson our children need to know: that success is a journey. It is like setting a goal when you’re traveling. That is how to succeed in life. And, yes, there’s no turning back—no dead-fish attitude—anymore. Dead fish don’t swim against the current. Like dead leaves, they are just tossed around at the whim of the waves, battered and lifeless. We are not like that. That is not our attitude, for we are winners. We won’t quit.
If there are stumbling blocks along our way, we won’t turn our backs on them like pure cowards—like the surrounding failures. We’d rather treat them as a challenge; as a problem that we must solve one after the other. In our success journey, we are determined to turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones. We are taller than our task. That’s our conviction to succeed in life!
Maintain Your Focus and Passion for Your Goal
We all know Thomas Edison [although a questionable character historically], the inventor of the incandescent lamp, which is the source of those lovely lights we have. Anywhere you go in the civilized world, you can feel his significant contribution to civilization as you see skyscrapers so vibrant, with a thousand lights during the night. Without Edison, we couldn’t have said that New York is a city that never sleeps. It was Edison who stated that: “Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.”
But hard work was not his only secret, for he was deaf—and that was his greatest secret of all. He was deaf to the negative opinions, the sarcasm of all the surrounding people. That is the other secret of success: sticking to your dominant passion for accomplishing your goal. Yes, that’s how to succeed in life.
Is Success Simply the Accumulation of Wealth?
Try to read some good books about success if you want to find that success principles are the same, that success is a journey; a goal setting; an attitude; a passion; a hard work. It is positivism!
As a student of the “University of Success,” to use Og Mandino, I believe that to succeed in life, we need to understand whether success is simply the accumulation of wealth.
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Bill Gates of Microsoft are two of the most successful men of our century. Again, our barometer in saying it is the billions of dollars they have rolled up as wizards of the computer industry.
However, in Mandino’s “The Greatest Salesman in the World,” he said that financial success without love is no success at all. Will you consider yourself truly successful if you have lots of money in your vault, but no family to call your own?
Plato once said that to be remembered, a man needs to father a son, build a house, plant a tree, and write a book. Have a family to love and share your life with. And that’s how to succeed in life.
Success is Not a Destination
Qualifying the meaning and essence of success is paramount. I would like to share the story of someone who said that after long years of inventing and reinventing how to succeed as a blogger, he now blogs for just around two hours daily, and then does some other things that can make him happy, such as traveling and buying things. He now has enough money to give him financial freedom.
In other words, money per se doesn’t make one truly successful, for success, in its truest perspective and essence, is a kind of achievement that makes man enjoy a peaceful and happy existence.
I read somewhere about a beggar who said to the King: “Your Majesty, you are better than me in everything, but you can’t be happier than I can be.”
Success is a journey, not a destination. Success is something that makes life truly exciting, honest, and dignified. And that’s how to succeed in life.
If success is measured by the amount of money you have in the bank, then Mahatma Gandhi (or even Jesus Christ!) was a colossal failure in this world.
Don’t Reinvent Success
Sidney Bremer once said that we need not reinvent success. All we need to do is to follow in the footsteps of those who are ahead of us.
Bremer then talked at length about Charles M. Schwab, the first president of the U.S. Steel Corporation. Schwab had been the highest-paid employee in the world during his time. He was just a laborer who turned into the president of one of the biggest corporations in the world.
His philosophy was to work more than pay. I like Schwab’s work motto. I’ve been sharing it with many people during my lectures. But there’s one thing about him: he “died bankrupt, living on borrowed money for five years before his death.”
Hence, success is not merely “money, money, money.” Rather, it is life itself—the long journey of having a happy family, of being a peaceful and happy person, and of having enough bread in order not to live on borrowed money until death. That is how to succeed in life.
Never Forget God
I wrote a little something somewhere about Christina Onassis, who was so rich, and yet so miserable! Never forget God on your way to success and riches:
Be very close to God on your way to riches. That’s how to succeed in life!
