Dedication means strong devotion or loyalty to something particular. It can be people, object or a goal. Success requires Dedication. Because success also requires a lot of time, efforts, and patience. And committing to those phases is called dedication. In every self-made successful people like Microsoft founder Bill Gates, SpaceX founder Elon Musk, we can identify a lot of hard work and dedication in their starting phrase. That’s why they are successful.
If you are planning on graduating from University or starting a startup. It’ll require a lot of dedication. Otherwise you can’t Win. You need to go through a lot of failure, re-attempt, and learning. Then comes Success. To build dedication in your personal life, and continue spreading it to your professional life. Follow the steps given below:
Focus on efforts, not on contemplating the results
When most of us start a life journey such as opening a startup, or writing a book. We often focus too much contemplating the results. This is a mistake. Even though the end result can be sweet, the steps required are hard, and requires a lot of dedication and effort.
If we focus on efforts and steps, which are required to achieve success. We will be more efficient in the journey. The goal is to succeed in journey. results are just the collective outcome of many steps we have taken. So, contemplating on efforts, and creating a guideline will help you stay dedicated on the path to success.
Set up realistic expectations
When the outcome doesn’t align with the expectations, we often give up. Because failure feels so hard. We lose hope, and re-attempting feels hard. Instead, setting up a realistic expectation by comparing your ability, efforts and mental condition will help you rebrand your journey.
For example, if you are going to climb mount Everest. First, consider if you have the previous experience of climbing a mountain. Also ask yourself if you carry the stamina, strength and energy to climb the mountain. Even If you do, consider if your goal is realistic with your vision and mission. Then, invest time in learning more about other’s journey and acquire the process in climbing mount Everest. This can be a fine example of setting up a realistic expectation. You can’t expect to climb mount Everest overnight if you don’t have enough knowledge, experience and budget in achieving that.
Find meaning in your goal
Whatever activities you perform needs to have a meaning. If any activity doesn’t give you a sense of meaning, there is a less probability of you achieving success.
Suppose, if you want to be a successful writer, you must have interest in writing. If you want to be a sportsman, you need to have passion for sports. If anyone just want to become a writer just because it pays more, instead of following his/her passion to become sportsman because it pays less. This is not only devastating for your psychological aspects of a success journey, it will also detrimental to your overall goal. Because anything which doesn’t make you happy or serve your sense of meaning. Eventually It will feel worthless, and psychologically won’t provide much value.
Build up mental strength, learn to thrive in difficult situations
Mental strength is required to deal with stress, difficult situations, and challenging tasks. During the journey of achieving success, a person has to face many difficulties, challenges and failure. These aspect drains a lot of mental energy. To deal with those issues, you need to have mental strength.
To build up mental strength, you need to adopt some lifestyle adjustment, and take some actions. Once you build enough mental strength, even if your goal gets disrupted in your journey, you can take calculative and problem-solving decisions, and further bolsters your mind to refrain from giving up. Some actions are described below:
- Taking hard steps and getting out of your comfort zone will help you get accustomed to challenging situations. Facing challenging situations will help you gradually build resilience. Resilience will help you boost your mental strength.
- Physical exercise can boost both physical and mental strength if done on consistent basis for significant amount of time.
- Mindfulness activities can detox your mind from stresses and negativity.
Do not mix your happiness with success
Happiness is a state of mind where you made peace with your life, and you feel enough satisfaction and pleasure. Success and ambitions, are just a part of your life which makes your life worth living. It gives your life a sense of purpose and meaning. Without a purpose, life feels mundane and boring. That’s why people live through passion and ambition. But success is not the meaning of life. Success gives you purpose which is one of the tools to achieve happiness. But it is not the whole part of it. To become truly happy, we should also need to invest in family, friendship, career, health, and hobbies. Gratitude is also a great tool to boost your happiness and life satisfaction. Just chasing career alone won’t give you happiness. And if you spend too much time in career, while neglecting other aspect of happiness. Life won’t be as positive as you would expect.
While chasing success, an individual should also invest in other important aspect of life as discussed above.
Remember that failure is an opportunity to learn
Failure teaches us what attempts we made wrong. Sometimes one attempt can gain success. On the other hand, success can be the result of years of learning, testing, and experiencing from failure. When people give up, they shut the door for success. If people take appropriate actionable steps, and still fail. It would help them learn from the failure, and further not take those steps. Thus, helping them more staying more calculative and experiences in re-attempting. This increases the probability of success. At the end of the journey, you can at least tell yourself, you have tried instead of giving up. It will make things easier.
Build perseverance:
Perseverance means staying consistent on an activity even after delayed success or during difficult situation. It is hard to achieve success in a goal. Most important factor in achieving success is time. Beside consistent efforts and hard work, it might take a lot of time to see results in a success journey. During that period, a person may experience some sort of failure. Which often encourages a person to give up. Which doesn’t help at all. Instead staying patience, and doing all the steps appropriate to achieve success is the only formula to success.
Perseverance is a mental processing power. To build perseverance do the following activities regularly:
- Exercise your willpower regularly.
- Cut off all useless activities.
- Practice Delayed Gratification.
- Give yourself frequent breaks
- Enjoy your life.
- Reduce your boredom.
- Find meaning in your tasks.
- Practice gratitude.
- Learn from failure.
- Expect for positive outcome.
- Invest more time in learning.
