Self-belief is the most important quality that we need for success in any endeavour.
I don’t care what you’re trying to do – get in shape, build a business, paint a picture, if you don’t believe in what you’re trying to do then you’ll get nowhere.
I’ve been blessed with enormous self-belief from a very young age. One thing that my parents excelled at was in making me believe that I could do anything that I set my mind to in this world.
Read that last sentence again, I selected the words very carefully. I didn’t write “anything that I wanted…”, it was “anything that I set my mind to…”.
Another thing that my parents instilled in me, much more by example than by telling, was that you get nowhere without hard work, and that without hard work and a degree of sacrifice you will never value or appreciate your accomplishments.
To use a crude example, whilst we all want to be the multimillionaire lottery winner, the man who has made his money through his own hands, guile and graft is going to have an infinitely higher amount of satisfaction, pride, and self-awareness than the lucky bugger who won the dumb tax game.
Self-belief without being married to hard work just makes you a dreamer.
The point I want to make about self-belief and hard work is that whilst together they can accomplish miracles, you don’t have to beat yourself up if you sometimes fall short.
I knew exactly what it takes to be successful long before I ever enjoyed any genuine success. I played around the edges, made more than a few rash decisions, indulged my vices, and never really committed enough of myself to a project to make it stick. I blew hot and cold.
If you look back on the things that haven’t quite come off for you, and it can be something as seemingly straightforward as losing 20lbs right up to building a multi-million-dollar business, and beat yourself up for your failures, then I want to tell you to stop that right now.
Use your failures as lessons; don’t be scared to use them as harsh lessons because I wholeheartedly believe we all need wake-up calls from time to time, and remember that lessons are always positive things because we LEARN from them and move forward.
I’ve missed more goals than I’ve scored. I’ve started a diet “on a Monday” only to fail abjectly mid-week more times than I could ever hope to count.
I’m really not that far different from the hordes of frustrated dieters out there, and I’ve been a truly miserable wreck at several times in my professional career as I’ve looked ignominy and failure squarely in the face.
If you’re not where you want to be today, then the difference between you and me is only in the fact that I got back up on my horse one more time than you and I truly believed that with hard work I could make it.
Self-belief that emanates from hard work and persistence is one of the strongest forces in the world, I want to cultivate this in my own young children, and strive to teach it to all my team at UP so that we can pass it on to you.
