Don't Change Anything !!!

While hard work is necessary in order to succeed, it is not always possible to change your circumstances just because you put in hard work. The road to success requires a variety of factors, luck being one of those factors. That’s how I see it.

You see a lot of successful people talk about how hard they work. The hours they’ve invested, the sacrifices they’ve made, the risks they took, and the challenges they’ve faced.

None of that is wrong. It is good to see how other people dealt with those challenges to become the people they are today. Hear from the experiences of others and you may learn something new. Something that might help you be successful too.

But hard work isn’t enough to change your circumstances. Even when you work hard and do all the right things, things may not work out for you anyway. That’s how life is.

You can:

• Learn new skills to help you build your career/start a business
• Build relationships with other people who can help you
• Pursue new opportunities to help you grow. Can be starting a new job, making a business investment, etc.
• Make personal investments. Can be for personal development like education, financial ones like investing in the right things, etc.
• Develop new habits to save money, be more productive, etc.

But you might not encounter success, because life doesn’t go in your favor. And you can’t do anything about it.

Contests/competitions are great examples of this:

You can prepare for competitions, train hard, learn new techniques to give yourself an edge over the competition. But there’s still only one 1st place prize and only one winner.

You can prepare even more than the eventual winner, but still come up short because the winner got lucky, judges weren’t as impressed with your efforts or an accident happens on the day and you lose your focus/physical state. The list goes on.

Obviously, the winner’s going to say “I got here through hard work and determination”, rather than point to other factors.

But things could easily be different.

This can also happen in your career as well:

In my career, I was a system administrator for a small startup company. I even continued developing my skills to improve in my role.

But the company was acquired by a larger company who eventually saw that there was only a need for one system administrator person, and my manager, who had more experience with the company’s operations got to stay. I got the boot.

Didn’t matter how hard I worked or the value I clearly demonstrated. I couldn’t have kept that job no matter what I did.

Hard work doesn’t always get you the success you want

We hear how people became successful through their efforts. They took risks, made important decisions, had some failures but through it all they became successful.

On the other hand, we’re only seeing things from the winner’s perspective. There are many people who were in the same situation, worked just as hard and smart but luck wasn’t on their side.

Your first gut instinct might be to say “Well, they didn’t work as hard” or “They made the wrong choice” or even “They weren’t brave enough to do what was needed”.

I can see where that comes from. But that’s not usually why people don’t find success when they work hard.

Because when successful people look back at the choices they made, it seems obvious that doing what they did lead to their success.

But if they failed, would they be saying the same thing? I don’t think so. We’d be looking at another successful person who’d say they succeeded because of the choices that they made, which were different from the first person’s.

Success is fickle like that. There’s no secret formula to success. You get lucky sometimes and that’s how you succeed! Others don’t get lucky and their lives don’t change.

That being said:

If you do nothing to change your circumstances and continue doing the same things every day without changing a thing, finding success will be harder. Not impossible, but it will be hard.

People try new things, challenge themselves, or learn something new to open up opportunities they can pursue. Not all of them will work out, but only a few have to in order to find success.

Don't disappoint yourself. Respect your skills always. Keep a try. keep fail. Soon you will be massive.