Learn your own way. The most underrated key to success.

Are you regularly influenced by others opinions? Do you read business advice and self-help? If so, you’re in the majority. But ask yourself honestly, have other opinions made a significant positive impact on your success?
If there’s so much good advice out there that works, why is it 99% of people still fail? Why is it only the elite that actually achieve massive success? Why is it, you can’t help thinking the self-help guru is only there to make money rather than actually help you? Why is it you can’t help thinking you’re missing something to achieve the real success you are after?

Question the norm
Steven Spielberg once said “your instincts and human intuition always whispers, it never shouts. Its very hard to hear.” In a world full of information being thrown in your face on what should and shouldn’t be done, we forget to listen to the most important voice, ourselves.

I love hearing others advice, I love self-help and I love the whole idea of progressing myself. Like Tony Robins says “progress equals happiness”. The right advice can be a catalyst. It can speed up and supplement your journey to success. The question you should be asking is, what is the formula?

The formula is you. There are 7 billion people on earth and every single person is different. Yet every single piece of advice you will ever receive is not truly tailored to anyone except the person that said it. The truth is, it’s all about you. If you want to become truly successful you’re going to have to start looking at yourself for the answers. It’s so cliché I know, but then again I think clichés are often the truth, its just people find them too hard to follow.

We live in soup of mediocrity that is thrust upon us, driven by social norms and the fear of failure. It suffocates most people and limits a persons true potential. The bigger your dreams, the harder you have to fight to keep them alive. To achieve great success you need to challenge the norm. Your friends, your mentors, your parents. Everyone is just a product of his or her own experiences. If you want to achieve real success, you have to break free of the mould.

Steve Jobs, one of the most successful people on the planet once said, “Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.”

Shut the world out
I find sometimes you have to shut the world out and the influence from others and learn your own way to success. As Arnold Schwarzenegger said “Dig deep down and ask yourself who do you want to be, not what your parents or teachers want, but you, I’m talking about figuring out what makes you happy”. Answering those deep questions about yourself already puts you leagues ahead of most people. You’re starting to learn about yourself.

If you really want to progress, its essential to be true to yourself. Most of us see what we want to see. We’ll purposely focus on our strengths rather than our weaknesses. We’ll avoid the Skeleton in our closet because it hurts. However what has been forgotten is that it is the hard to deal with subjects that are the most rewarding to overcome. The game changers. The subjects only you can tackle.

Just imagine if every time you made a mistake you wrote down what you did wrong and how you could have prevented it. And you had done this for years, reviewed it and adding to it everyday. Just imagine how valuable that document would be. Your own self-help book. The best advice you’ll ever get!

Your own words will trigger a motivation that can be rarely felt from others. You can read about other people’s advice all over the Internet but do you take it in with complete conviction or do you carry on reading another article and forget it the next day. Sometimes it’s necessary to learn the hard way to really get the point. To feel the emotion, to live it and really learn from it.

Now we have the Internet we are force fed information from others. As you know, we are bombarded with advertisements, advice on how to live your life and what you should act like and look like. Isn’t it funny how the top personalities that we are led to be like are all very distinct. There is no right way. That is exactly one of the reasons why they are where they are; they have carved their own path and are true expression of themselves. You will never be the best copycat; you can only be the best you can be. That’s what makes people great.

Do it your own way
In essence its all about gradually teaching yourself to be the best you can be. Record your failures and your achievements and learn from them in a disciplined way. This sounds so basic, but often the truth is. Think of the millions of people that complain day in day out, yet do the same things every single day. People become set in their ways and improving themselves is off the agenda. Change to them is not welcomed, it’s feared.

In fact there’s probably only one significant thing that is holding you back and you avoid it. It could be anything, perhaps work ethic or productivity or confidence. Sometimes it’s not immediately apparent and that’s where you have to put the work in. But when you find it and relentlessly work on it, that’s when the real change happens. That’s when you start breaking the mould and moving towards success.

I encourage you to think for yourself without other people’s influence and discover what you truly want. And work at it like there is no tomorrow. Instead of educating yourself from others, ask the most qualified person to answer that question, yourself. As Margret Thatcher said “Don’t follow the crowd, let the crowd follow you”.

By its very nature it is hard to define exactly what should be done because the whole point is that it is specific to you. You need to make your own plan. Start with what do you want, what are you good at and how can you go about getting it? Forget about any plan that was laid out before you. This is the time to be true to yourself.

So what’s the catch? It’s extremely difficult. Unlike reading a ‘10 tips to get rich’ article, you have to face the cold hard truth, which many people can’t do. You have to consistently seek your weaknesses and improve them.

No article is going to tell you what they are. You have to work it out yourself. It takes a lot of time, it takes patience and it takes steely determination.

Last word
Truly great people understand themselves. They understand who they are and what they want. They don’t listen to what they should do and what you shouldn’t do. What is right and what is wrong. They selectively listen to others opinions but they are acutely aware only they know what is truly best for them.

I believe when we work it out ourselves and listen carefully to that whisper of intuition, that’s when the real change happens. I believe the right advice can be helpful but it doesn’t guarantee success the same way it did for the person who spoke it. I believe we write our own keys to success.