Success Close to Home

Looking for success? You might be looking in the wrong place. The keys to success may well be closer than you think.

The thinking goes something like this: “I am here and I’m not successful. That means I’m not successful because I’m here. And that means if I want to be successful I need to look elsewhere.”

This type of thinking doesn’t only relate to our physical location—the old “there’s just no opportunity here”—but also to what we have in our mental store—the goods stored away in the old grey matter. When we feel that we aren’t successful, we feel that the lack of success is due to something we lack in ourselves.

It’s true that we sometimes have to move to a different physical location in order to find the success we crave, but it’s not always true. If you are in a place where there just really isn’t any opportunity—though most places have more than you think—then you might have no choice but to up sticks and move. But it might be the case that you just aren’t opening your eyes to opportunities that could lead to being successful. And although there are often times when you need to learn a new skill in order to find success in some field or other, you could find that the skills and knowledge you already possess are just what you need to be successful—and the reason success has eluded you is that you just haven’t recognized those skills for what they are and put them to good use.

The trick is to stop thinking that success lies somewhere “out there” and realize that it is actually more “in here”… But in order to do this we need to change our thinking and our focus. This is something that we can find difficult, and the reason for the difficulty lies in the way the human mind works: we tend to blank out stuff which is familiar because there’s no need to think about it. Thinking can be hard work and the less we have to do, the better—or so the reasoning goes.

Familiarity breeds contempt

It could be true that familiarity breeds contempt, but you could also say that familiarity breeds blindness. For instance, I once lived in a house that been designed by an interior designer. It wasn’t that grand a house—three bedrooms, one bathroom, decent garden—but the woman who had owned the house before I did had obviously wanted to turn the place into something special. When I went to view the house I was impressed by how every room had been made to look its best. In the lounge, two of the walls had been decorated with colored panels which made the room look extremely long and spacious. In the bathroom, the wall tiles had been set at a 45 degree angle and set in a bright red grout. It wasn’t a large or luxurious bathroom, but that design touch gave it a special touch.

When I first moved into the house, I was constantly looking at—and appreciating—these design touches. In the lounge I would often look up from what I was doing and get a feeling of warm appreciation as I looked at the long panels on the wall, soaking up the regal feeling of space. Whenever I took a bath, I soaked up the sight of those tiles and the bright red grout. Living in that house was a joy.

Then one day, I just forgot about the design. It became commonplace, just a part of the background. I just didn’t notice things anymore. It was only on the rare times that I had someone unfamiliar with the house come visit that I was reminded of how great the place looked—because invariably the visitors commented on it. I would go back to appreciating the look of the place again for a few days, and then I would forget the design again and allow it to slip into the background.

Taken for granted

That’s the way it is with our surroundings, and it’s the way things are with ourselves. Our skills and experiences become so familiar that we take them for granted and don’t see that they could be used to make us successful or more successful than we already are.

We all have mental assets that we can use to put us on the road to success. One often overlooked asset that can be put to great use is your experiences. People will pay well to learn something which can save them time or a headache—or both. :-) You probably have some great knowledge that could help other people and turn yourself into a great success doing it. And today, knowledge is more saleable and easier to publish than ever before. Take this website as an example. A laptop computer and an internet connection is all that’s needed and a global audience is within reach.

And if publishing knowledge isn’t your game, you can still take your experiences and use them as a basis to start a successful business, or to move toward the success you want. But before you use your skills and experience to be successful, you need to know what they are. What’s needed is a formal assessment of your skills so that you can see what’s there. A way to do this is simply to sit down and write down what you are good at. Then do some brainstorming with each skill to see what could be made of it. Ask yourself: “What if there were people willing to pay for me to use skill X…” Or “What if people would be willing to pay to learn about my experience of Y…”

Skills and experience

Take an honest inventory every now and again—about once every six months or once a year—of your skills and experience. You’ll always find that there’s something that you do better than many other people. Remind yourself constantly of the successes you have had, and constantly be looking for the things you possess which can lead to more success.

Of course, you need to take action, to put those skills to use. But it’s essential to remember that the factors that could lead to your success are often not somewhere else—some place yet to be discovered—but right there, ready for you to use.

If you find that this self-assessment approach doesn’t work for you, look at the possibility of getting yourself a coach who can help you see talents and skills that you have and which you just aren’t appreciating. If you want to use your skills to find a better job, career counseling can help.

The next time you find yourself thinking: “How do I achieve success?” and find yourself looking “out there”, take a look closer to home. You could well be pleasantly surprised…