Do you know how good you are at what you do? When was the last time you did an objective evaluation of your skills, abilities and aptitudes - that determine how 'successful' you are in whatever it is that you do? Most people, especially those in the professional, entrepreneurial or academic fields, have systematic ways available to them to gauge how good they are at what they do - only that they don't use those measurement systems properly to their advantage.



Do you have a simple and understandable method to measure your level of success in what you do? For example, if you're in business for yourself, how do you measure your success? By the amount of sales generated in a given time? By how much in total assets your business owns? By how much free time you have while your business runs on autopilot, generating profits for you with minimal maintenance?

How does a student measure her success, then? By how much her grades have improved as compared to the number of hours she had spent studying? Everyone has a way to quantitatively and qualitatively measure their success. What is yours?

Observations and measurements compose only one part of the success formula, but what is more important is how you feel about yourself, specifically, how competent or 'able' you feel to achieve the targets in your sights. Success in any endeavour depends on how well and how fast you are able to learn the necessary skills that bring about desired results.

Success is an acquirable state - it can be learned. It's not written on a stone tablet somewhere in the nether regions of the sky whether or not you will be successful in life. In brief, like any other subject in school, you can learn to be successful, just as you had been able to learn the letters of the alphabet or stand on your own two feet. The previous statement probably sounded simplistic but it is true.

What is probably distancing you from achieving your target is simply your inability or ineptitude in performing the required actions that bring about your desired results. What causes that inability? Perhaps you had missed out on an important element that was missing in what you did and crucial to bringing about the exact results that you wanted. Why? Did you purposely leave that out? Or had you just forgotten? Or perhaps you had not realised it until now.

The more you know, and the more you know about what you don't know (and then go on to do whatever it takes to know what you need to know), the better your chances are at succeeding in attaining whatever targets you had set for yourself.

The first step in effectively learning and acquiring the skills you need to succeed in your current endeavours is an inner step - a mental one. If you begin with this, you have better odds of succeeding. Otherwise, your success rate might be lower or worse, you will somehow and inadvertently cause yourself to fail.

What is this first step? Your success begins with your being able to feel that you are able to succeed. Do you think you can? Do you believe you can? Are you sure you can? If so, then you most definitely can do it! Simplistic as it might have sounded, it goes way beyond feelings of being able to succeed. It has to be a sincere one, something that resonates with you as something truthful.

You can't fake feelings. Fake it till you make it won't cut it here. Quit the guru's who tell you to fake it till you make it. The only way you can create an authentic feeling of competence, the only way you can generate a genuine belief in yourself and your ability to succeed is to consciously go about doing the work that is required to give you the ability to succeed - how?

By learning! Seriously, there is no limit to how much you can learn or what you can learn. Your brain is not wired in such a way that you can only learn arithmetic, numerical skills and alphabets but you can't learn physical skills like riding a bicycle, swimming or driving (unless, of course, one is genuinely physically impaired - but even then, exceptions to this have sprung up countless times).

When you first learned how to walk, or how to read, or how to feed yourself with a fork and spoon, did you have to chant affirmations, set goals, think positive or even visualize positive cosmic energy flowing to you? No! You acquired all these skills because of necessity and the fact that countless other human beings have learned to do the same when they were young and your parents were there to slowly but surely ensure your success.

People tend to overcomplicate things and forget that simplicity is the essence of action. Reclaim that simplicity into your life to get what you want.