Success comes in all forms, whether it be how you did on a test, a work project, closing a sale, losing weight, quitting smoking or another addiction, asking that certain someone on a date finally, landing a job or promotion or raise, etc. We all know, or should know, that in life we get our self-esteem from challenging ourselves and pushing our inner-being harder and farther than we never thought possible. You can't succeed unless you put yourself out there. There's a certain vulnerability that comes with trying, though, and perhaps why so many don't even bother showing up let alone showing up and quitting under pressure.
But what if you thought of success as essential to your life and overall, like breathing?
What if to you, succeeding was as natural an occurrence as walking outside and taking in a big gulp of (hopefully) fresh air? Imagine you couldn't function, not only without breathing, but without succeeding. What would your life be like, without air? Without success?
The day you look at giving up everything you knew and thought you knew, the day you sacrifice literally everything and put yourself out there, is the day you learn to succeed. And by this time, you will be so natural excelling that just like that, unless you have asthma, you will be succeeding like you do breathing, in that it's just something natural happening.
When Wayne Gretzky retired, he gave the adage of advice "Worry about the small things and everything else will take care of itself." For an athlete, this could mean working on the fundamentals, over and over again. An author, writing thousands of pages, reading a thousand more. Musicians, jam out on your instrument hours on end or challenge your voice to go farther every verse.
You don't need to be pursuing a glamorous or artistic endeavor to apply the idea of succeeding like breathing. Whatever your goals are, set them and focus on the foundation of accomplishing them. Maybe you're a teacher or trainer and want to engage your audience more, a business owner looking to increase sales or keep more customers coming back to you, or a student looking to up your grades or get a part-time job to save up for a new car. It's not going to be easy, and you will quite often fail at first, but failure lets you know that at the end of the day, you can still get up and you can try again, at least this time knowing where you went wrong.
Dwight Howard, considered the best big man in the NBA, had recently confided in Kobe Bryant, his teammate, who is considered one of the greatest athletes of all time, and certainly one of the deadliest competitors, that he was afraid of missing shots, inevitably missing when finally shooting.
Kobe's response?
"You know what? Shoot 1,000 jump shots a day. You're going to miss a lot of those shots. But that's OK. Because you're teaching yourself it's OK to miss."
Whatever it be that's in your heart, that you want to do, just keep breathing. Try until you are succeeding as naturally as you are breathing. You will get there! And don't be so hard on yourself if you at first you don't succeed.