No Success Without External Focus
Success can be a very elusive thing. It’s daunting, frustrating, it seems to quite often be just out of reach.
We desire success and pursue it, yet somehow success keeps getting away just before we catch it.
Elusive Success
There is a video on YouTube that was popular for a while and went viral. It shows a mouse attempting to steal a cookie that is twice the size of the mouse and take it back to his hiding place. We can begin to feel like this mouse must have felt as attempt after attempt resulted in failure. This grand prize and yet we can’t bring it home.
Is Success the Focus?
Success can elusive, especially when we focus on success alone.
And that’s the problem.
When we focus simply on being a success, it’s very hard to be a success. Because that’s all it becomes about. Our dreams can make us focus on the inside sometimes, but that’s not what dreams are meant to do.
Our dreams aren’t meant to add value to us, our dreams are meant to add value to other people.
So if you learn to point your dreams and your actions outwardly – if you get an external focus – and learn how to care about other people, learn to focus on other people with your dreams, then you are going to see significantly more success than what you have seen in the past – all by creating an external focus.
When we place our focus on others, we learn to love others. We learn to care for others. We get to know their stories. We get to know their hopes and dreams. We begin to see value in them.
When we see value in people, we are then in a position to add value to them.
By adding value to others, we create value in ourselves. Once that happens, success will follow AS LONG AS WE REMAIN OPEN TO RECEIVING THE VALUE OTHERS WANT TO GIVE US.
But if we focus only on success, it remains out of reach.
Success, you see, is not a goal or a direct result of organized actions. Success is a by-product of our behaviors, attitudes, and actions on behalf of those we have chosen to serve. When we combine the power of our unique gifts and apply them to add value to other people – to create significance in their lives – success is a natural result.
Action Steps
Here’s a few thing to get you started in that direction:
- CARE FOR THE PEOPLE YOU ENCOUNTER. Whether you encounter them once in a lifetime or whether you encounter them on a daily basis, learn to care for those people. Learn to connect with them. To find out more about them. To be naturally curious about other people. And from that, you are going to be able to seek to add value to other people to make a difference in their lives.
- LISTEN TO PEOPLE. Listen to their concerns, listen to what their dreams are.
- SHARE YOUR DREAM WITH THEM. You may be able to build relationships out of that which may seem to be a one-time thing but become lifelong, mutually beneficial relationships. People can’t add value to you unless you open up to them and make yourself vulnerable by sharing your passions and dreams.