Success is what people are searching for their whole lives. There are tons and tons of books, seminars, workshops, blogs, etc to share a thing or two about success.
It all depends on your own definition of success, it can mean different thing to different people. And because of this, there are many things you can do to achieve the success you want in life.
Below are the 51 awesome tips for success in business and life. The list below does not follow through any order. I wrote the tips in random order. So you can go through and follow through the ones that clicked with you…
1. Dare to Dream Big
A very normal tip, but also one of the most powerful tips you can find. A lot of people don’t dream big. Ask yourself, do you wake up excited every morning? Do you feel thrilled whenever you think about your dreams? If your answer is a no, then you are not thinking big enough.
2. Go with Your Passion
What’s the meaning of life if you wake up every morning and spend most of your time doing things that you don’t like or hate? This is your life and you can choose to live it your way. Choose to do something that you are passionate with. Ordinary people are paid to do their work; great people are paid to master their craft. Here’s why you need passion to success.
3. Set Goals and Break Them into Actionable Steps
Do you set goals? Do you write them down? Commit and set your goals. Understand that you can only achieve outstanding success if you commit to your targets. And break down your goals into smaller actionable steps that you can act on immediately.
4. Try Something New
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. So try something new whenever possible. If you want to live a fully engaged life, you have to inject “freshness” into your life. Try to use other route to work. Try out a new restaurant once a week. Try visit a place you have never been.
5. Challenge Yourself
Always stretch yourself beyond your limit. If you can do 20 pushups in one go, challenge yourself and go for 30. You will never know your own limitation until you do it. Success lies outside of your comfort zone, all you have to do is to get out there and grab it.
6. Create a Blueprint for Success
Do you have a plan for what you want to achieve? If you want to be rich, do you have a blueprint for it? If you want to build a successful business, do you have a plan? Remember, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Get everything down into plan and work on your plan.
7. Accomplish 5 Tasks Each Day
I call this the “Big Five”. In order to make sure that you move forward toward the direction you want each day, you need to accomplish at least 5 tasks that will get you there. And try to get these tasks done as early as possible. Once you get your 5 important tasks done, you will feel brighter and have a sense of accomplishment. Go here for additional read.
8. Travel Overseas
Travel overseas to country that you have never been before, at least once a year. Traveling can expand your horizon and you get to experience things that you normally won’t get to. It gives your life new references and get you out of your comfort zone.
9. Save At Least 10% of Your Income
It is said that how much you earned does not matter, but how much you saved that makes all the difference. Save at least 10% of your income for emergency or for investment when the time is right. When you know you have money in your bank, you will feel better and relief than worrying and stress about money.
10. Go Extra Miles
Do better than you asked of yourself. Amaze your clients with your products and services. Impress your boss with your work and create more value for your company. When you commit to go extra miles, you set yourself a higher benchmark that make you the market leader and win the competition.
11. Eat Healthy Foods
You cannot succeed without having a healthy body. What’s the point if you can have a lot of money but don’t have the health to enjoy it? So have a healthy diet and it will give you the energy you want to go all out in your life.
12. Read 30 Minutes Everyday
Successful people read a lot. Leaders are readers. They learn consistently and they read to grow their knowledge. So make a habit to read at least 30 minutes a day. If you can do more, go for 1 hour every day. Go here to discover the benefits of reading.
13. Spend Quality Time with Family
I believe that you don’t want to be successful and still feel lonely right? If you study the biography of successful people, you will see that most of them have a supporting family behind. And they value their family members a lot. You need the sense of connection to feel “whole”.
14. Stay Happy For No Reason
If you can read this article, it means that you are rich enough and you don’t have to worry about starving to death. You don’t need a reason to be happy. Look around you with everything that you have right now. So count your blessings and be happy with your life now.
15. Get a Mentor
Isn’t it good to have someone there to guide you and mentor you in getting what you want? So get a mentor. Choose someone who has the ability to guide and has achieved what you wanted. A lot of success has been attributed to having a mentor.
16. Envision the Future
Always look into the future. Successful business people like Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Larry Ellison think far into the future. What do you want to achieve? What do you want to accomplish in your life? Like what Walt Disney has to say, “If you can dream it, you can achieve it.”
17. Take Risks
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. If you don’t dare to lose sight of the shore, how are you going to discover new seas and lands? So take risks, take calculated risks. Everything you do will be risky if you have no idea and no knowledge about what you do. So get prepared and do your homework, and then take the calculated risk.
18. Form a Mastermind Group
You cannot build a successful business all on your own. Every successful business owner has their own mastermind group where like-minded people share their ideas and improve. This is why we have meetings in our company. You have to form your own mastermind group.
19. Write Your Gratitude List
What can you be thankful for? Each morning right after I woke up, I will read my gratitude list before I started my day. You will feel more thankful and happy. More importantly, you will be able to start your day great.
20. Exercise Regularly
Again, if you study the biography of most successful people, you will notice that they spend their mornings on exercises. They work out before they start their day. It is said that if you exercise, your body will release endorphin that will make you feel good.
21. Believe In Yourself
If you don’t believe in yourself, no one would. So believe that your dreams are possible and trust that you can do it. When you started to believe in you and your dreams, you will tap into your potential and get more things done. Here’s the reason why you should believe in yourself.
22. Do Donation
What you have learned, teach and educate others. What you have earned, share and donate to those who are in need. Make it a habit to do donation from time to time. It is alright even if the amount is not big, as long as you do.
23. Review Your Goals Everyday
Most people fail to accomplish their goals simply because they never put their goals in their mind. They set their goal once and forget about it after that. The secret to achieving your goal is to constantly review it every day. When you review your goal, you will remind yourself about it and you will act upon it.
24. Create a Vision Board
Vision board is another powerful tool that you should leverage to help you accomplish what you wanted. The principle behind is just like setting goal, but vision board is like the name suggests, you can envision it. So create the vision boards for both your business and your life.
25. Attend Seminar or Workshop
Commit to attend at least a seminar or a workshop to improve your knowledge and your skills. When you attend these events, you will get the chance to know others who share the same goals like you do. Make it a habit for constant and never ending improvement.
26. Have Fun in Business
Running a business should be fun. Richard Branson said, “A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts.” Don’t do it for the money, do it because you love doing it and it makes you feel alive.
27. Have Fun in Life
Life is short, so have more fun. Do more things and accomplish more. Take more risks and enjoy your life more. We all don’t know when we are going to leave this world, so live each day to the fullest and make your life fun.
28. Speak On Stage
This seems like the biggest fear most people had. Overcome it by doing it. You can build your confidence and better manage your team and company if you have a strong presentation skill.
29. Praise Someone
Make effort to praise someone each day. If you want others to praise you and do good to you, you have to first do that to others. So praise and compliment others and you will see how the effect will come back to you.
30. Volunteer to Help Out
How often did you volunteer to help out? Most people did that when they are in their school. However, after they have graduated and get into the working life, they never really volunteer to do something good for the community and world anymore.
31. Build Confidence in Yourself
When you are confident, you can take on the world, you dare to take the risk and you dare to make the call. Thus, you definitely need to learn how to build confidence in yourself if you want to get to higher ground. Here’s how to boost your confidence.
32. Grow Your Network
There is a saying, “It’s not what you know. It’s who you know.” If you are surrounded with successful business people, do you think you will be as successful as them? So start to put in more effort to grow the right network from now on.
33. Spend Time in Solitude
Sometimes you just need to stay alone and refresh your mind. This is especially true when you are stressed and have no idea what to do. Just take a walk in the woods or in the garden and spend time alone will often give you a new insight.
34. Learn a New Skill
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook was able to learn Chinese and spoke in Mandarin on stage even when he had a busy schedule. So what have you learned after finished school? If your answer is a no, then you should seriously look into learning at least one new skill a year.
35. Get a Success Journal
Well, keeping your ideas, lessons learned and insights from your daily life is as important as eating if you are serious about success. Do you know that Richard Branson always have his notebook with him so that he can write down whatever comes into his mind? If you think this is outdated, you can use an iPad.
36. Celebrate Your Wins
Did you celebrate your wins? Do you know that it is important to celebrate all your wins so that they will become an anchor for your peak state? Look at all the great athletes out there, they celebrate all their wins with their signature moves such the fist pump.
37. It Is Alright to Lose Sometimes
Understand that there will be moment that you will face tough times and losing the battle in business. However, it is alright as this is just a cycle that everyone has to go through. As long as you understand this…
38. Learn From Your Mistakes
When you fail to achieve what you want or fail to hit your target, it is alright, but you have to learn from your mistakes. Successful people treat their mistakes and failures as feedback where they will learn and improve from there. This is how Thomas Edison invented the light bulb.
39. Think about What You Want
You will become who you think you will be. And this is seriously true. If you want to be a millionaire, you must first learn to adopt the thinking of a millionaire in financial terms. Your think will shape who you are, and hence, your results in life. So stop spending time thinking about what to eat for dinner, instead, think about your dreams. Here are 10 Ways How Successful Leaders Think.
40. Prioritize Your Work
If you want to get more things done, this is exactly what you needed to do. Do the most important thing that will move your life to the direction you want when the day starts. Watching YouTube and getting updates from Facebook can wait. So just work on your priority task first before you get distracted.
41. Think Positively
Some say that positive thinking is not going to make you successful, but I believe that thinking positive is still better than thinking negatively all the time. It may be true that positive thinking cannot changed what had happened, but it can gives you a sense of calm that hope is on its way.
42. Mix with the Right Group
Birds of the same feather flock together. If you want to be a winner, you have to mix with the winners. If you mix around with loser, you will end up becoming a loser as well. Get into the right group, mix with the right people and you will get affected by their energy and thinking that will change you.
43. Listen to Your Intuition
You just need to trust you gut feeling. Sometimes it may be hard to make the decision, but if you listen to your intuition, you will know what to do. Studies have shown that your inner voice is actually pattern recognition from your subconscious mind that tries to imply you what to do. Learn more about how to listen to your intuition.
44. Protect Your Dreams
Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do it or steal your dream from you. You have to protect your dream and keep your dream alive at all time. There will be naysayers who will splash cold water on your face. Just don’t give up on your dreams.
45. Be Proactive
Make things happen instead of waiting for things to happen. When times are bad, stop the complain and the blame game. Instead, go out and make things happen. Be more proactive and be the first to make the call. Successful people are always proactive and ready to make things happen.
46. Never Quit Never Give Up
If you quit and give up, you will lose. As long as you never quit, you will never lose. Look at all the successful people out there, they have gone through a lot of adversities and obstacles, but because they did not give up, they managed to create the breakthrough they wanted.
47. Improve Your Strategy
Are you working on something that is working for you? If your strategy in achieving what you want is not getting you the results, you have to change and improve your strategy. In the business world, this is often called innovation.
48. Know Your Purpose in Business and Life
Why do you do what you do in business and life? Why do you want to build a successful business? Why do you want to be successful in life? Remember, your purpose will give you the motivation you want when times are tough. If they don’t motivate you, then maybe your purpose is just not strong or emotional enough.
49. Study Success
If you want to be good in math, what should you do? You study math. If you want to be a great basketball player, what would you do? You learn to play basketball. So if you want to be successful, you have to study success. Even better, study why people fail and avoid those mistakes and you will get your result faster. Read more, The 7 Habits of Highly Successful Entrepreneurs.
50. Master What You Do
No matter what industry you are in, if you want to produce outstanding success, you need to master what you do best there. If you are in business, you need to master the business. If you are in sports, you need to master the skill. Consistently improve yourself and be the master in what you do.
51. Be Responsible
You are who you are today because of your own decision and action. Nobody forces you into doing it. You have to learn to take the responsibility for whatever happened so that you will take control over your life. If you want to change and live a better life, you must first learn that life is under your own control. So be responsible.
The Conclusion
There are many tips and ways to achieve the success you want in business and life. First, you have to be absolutely clear with your definition of success. What do you mean by being successful?
When you know exactly what you want, you can then set goals, create plans and take actions to achieve what you want.
Out of all the 51 success tips above, some may resonate with you some may not. Those that resonate with you, act on them and do something that will enrich your life now. For those that don’t, you may want to revisit this blog again at a later time.
After all, it is said that when the student is ready the teacher will appear. Share with me what you think…
Your each each steps are excellent and it made me to read all the steps. After Reading your Article it inspired me. Thank you so much for such helpful article it will help many people.
Great to hear that.. 🙂