BizWiz Blog

When I had a talk with one of my mentors a few months back, we had a deep discussion on how to achieve success. Success is, to most people, elusive. It seems to be always around the corner or peeking underneath a bush and yet when sought it seems to vanish, only to reappear again from a distance. It's tiring at times to try to grasp success and thus that's the reason, we think, why very few select people manage to achieve it.

Success is a vague thing at times and is hard to define. I think there is about as many definitions of success as there are talks about it! And yet almost everyone has some sort of visual representation of what success is. A father might think of it as growing old with his loving wife and children whom all graduated and have good jobs. To an employee, it might be to be at the top of the corporate ladder. To an entrepreneur it could be that his ventures are thriving, his profits multiplying.

And yet despite the differences in perspective there are some qualities that successful people might posses - that they are highly respected and deeply satisfied with their work.

Being both in the business of training people, me and my mentor tried to formulate a discernible patter on how one might achieve success. We came up with three things. These may not work for everyone, but these three helped us - and the people we train - on the road to success.

The first one is passion. And there two parts of passion. The first half is the passion for success. This is the drive to be successful no matter what it take, for how long it takes. This is what pushes us forward despite the bumps on the road (challenges), despite weight of the cargo (our past). One of my personal favorite story of passion is that of Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen. They are authors of the hugely successful Chicken Soup for the Soul series. They self-published the book, which means they got no marketing assistance from a dedicated publisher. That can make a budding writer have cold feet. But as Mark says in a newsletter I received, they had to be creative and innovative in marketing. Failure was not an option to them because their families depended on them. After two years, the book did get into the best sellers list. The rest is history.

The second is passion for what you do. I can't think of a better example than our own local cosplayer Alodia Gosiengfiao. Cosplaying (from the word costume roleplay) is dressing up as an another character and acting like the character. At first, Alodia was just doing it as a hobby. She joins cosplay events where hundreds of participants showcase their creativity. Nowadays she's a well known model. And she's about to take her cosplaying to new heights: apparently there's a possibility that she'll play as a character in the movie adaptation of the highly popular video game World of Warcraft. I have to mention also that she plays video games, including the aforementioned title. Not a bad path for a career only a few people can dream of that resulted from a hobby.

Indeed passion drives people forward. Yet passion must be directed to be successful. In my next post, I'll reveal what we decided as the second piece of the puzzle that completes a picture of success.

Till then!