What Does It REALLY Take To Be Successful?

You’ve heard it: time, patience, determination,  perseverance, education, support from others, creativity, _______. You fill in the blank with a quality that your parents, friends, colleagues, and strangers on Twitter told you. They are absolutely right, but not quiet.

Yes, these qualities are paramount to be successful. But my question to you is, how do you know what success is? How do you know when you’re there? There’s only one way to know where you are. It is to have a reference point. It’s very simple, but many people do not realize it. Without it your locomotive of hard work would have no destination, it would aimlessly wander through time and space.

What it REALLY takes to be successful is that reference point, which tells you what success is! Simple. You might have an idea of success, but that idea has no basis. It cannot be verified without referencing it to something else.

The reference point is… (drum roll please) FAILURE. If you don’t fail, you don’t know what real success is. Period. Fail, and fail often. The more you fail, the more information will you have on why you failed. The bigger your reference point is, the easier it is to identify success.

Think about it. If there was no cold, what would hot feel like; without hate, what would love to feel like; without day, what would the night be like? We live off of reference points in our daily lives, we just don’t realize it.

Fail as if you’ve never failed before to succeed as you’ve never succeeded before.

Have you failed today, this week, this month? Do it! I dare you.