How to celebrate success

Success is good. To aim for something, keep it in focus and work towards achieving it; it is such a good feeling. The thing about success is not so much of what is achieved but the turmoil you go through in achieving them.

The point is what will be the worth of success if it is a smooth sailing ship? What stories will you tell and who will regard your efforts. By experience, in business it is not the big contract you have grasped but how you negotiated and worked your way to achieving it.

Therefore, success becomes dangerous when it is used as a reference point, instead of a frontier in opening and conquering new assignments. In his epic book, “Outliers – The Story of Success,” Maxwell Gladwell, a journalist, tries to underscore the essence of success and the fact that the attainment of it is not so much of an individual effort than an extension of one’s family, culture and friendships.

In other words, your success is not dependent on your smartness, ambition, hard work and hustle. Depending on where you are born, who you come into contact with and the nurtured culture you are from, success cannot be an illusion.

He mentions the “10,000-hour rule” which postulates that to be successful, you should have accomplished a specific task consistently for 20 hours a week for 10 years. He cites the example of the Beatles, which performed live in Germany over 1,200 times from 1960 to 1964, amassing more than 10,000 hours of playing time.

This can be said to be the formula for success; It is pure effort, culminating in results.

So when you have achieved success, the next thing is to handle, manage and dictate the pace for success. Oftentimes when the Black Stars are playing and they show a little bit of brilliance, spectators get excited, then folly sets into the playing body.

They score a goal and then they become lackadaisical and uncultured. This attitude plagues most business people. We win a contract, and then all of a sudden our attitude changes and we feel on top of the world. The ability to handle success is as crucial as the efforts demanded in achieving such.

Your success must be fed on by someone else; consider your achievement as a stepping stone for another person, as your experiences and insights will be a guiding force for many.

Below are my four key points to handling success:

Celebrate, but wake up When you achieve any little success, have a moment to say, congrats. First to yourself, then to all who made it possible. Celebrating the moment is also an opportunity to delay gratification, especially when the big deal is yet to be struck.

You need to learn to pace yourself and consciously be aware of the hurdles ahead. As success is momentary, you should also create a series of them so you can sustain your interest and efforts. It takes a lot of thinking and level-headedness to count your successes, no matter how insignificant they are. Take success like a steroid, you need to inject one every so often. Therefore, in celebrating your successes, it is imperative that you create several avenues for new ones to emerge. Research shows that the gratification new success brings fades away within two weeks.

Have perspective What is the goal in all of your efforts? You will need to have a far-stretching goal which is ambitious, can be worked on gradually and will make you and the people around you fulfilled in the long term. Having perspective does not necessarily mean knowing the journey, but having a fair idea of where you want to go, what you want to achieve and how you will know when you get there.

This is best nurtured by attitude. If your perspective of success is material things, then it will be a quest to amass as much material wealth as possible. If it is having good food, then you will drive to the ends of the world to taste good food. If it is helping people, then your mission will be making people happy and bringing them fulfilment.

Watch your motivation You can never discount your motivations in your quest to be successful. As a matter of fact, it is your motivations which will drive you towards all that you do. Some motivations can lead to total destruction in the not-too-distant future; others can make you become a hero among your peers. In defining your motivation, bear in mind that all men have one mission on earth, and that is to help each other. So no matter your wishes and aspirations, always have a human factor to your achievements.