As I am preparing to join Warren Buffet ‘s Share holder meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, a friend of mine sent me an email asking if I have any questions in mind to ask him.  As I am a blogger and my mind works in preparing new topics for my readers all the time. I started to go through all the questions which I would like to ask Buffet if I had the chance.

Of course, I would ask a lot of questions, but I have to filter them down to one question. My question would be: What leads to success? I decided to answer this question in my post. First, nobody agrees on what success is.  Is it to be happy or to be rich or both? Some people have different definitions of success.  Whatever the definition of success, and this is not the topic of this post, I would love to know what leads to success.  Dr.  Richard St. Johns, in fact, studied this topic in detail. He spent seven years and conducted 500 interviews.  He came up with the following which he delivered as a TED talk:

1. Be passionate about what you do.  Passion, defined by doing what you love, accelerates achievement of the job you are doing. Having said that, don’t be excellent in something you hate.  It is fine to do it better than a lot of people, but don’t be the best one. Although your ability to accelerate in the job you hate might be higher than average, but sooner or later you will suffer from burn-out.
2. Work hard and have fun. A lot of scientific research came up with a fun way to work hard. It is not boring to work hard anymore.  You need to make the hard work a game, called gamification of your life.  Research shows that when people spend a lot of hours playing video games, they accelerate fast. It is their love and hard work allowing them to beat the game.  Many Apps were built  to make your life challenges like a game.  One of them is called Superbetter (which I don’t use) but it is really popular.  Others use Coach me App, which I like to use to build successful habits.
3. Get damn good at your work, with a growth mindset.  Anything you do with passion and hard work, sooner or later, you will be excellent at it — let me use this term —  “super excellent.” You have to remember that your mindset is growth.  Don’t ask yourself to be excellent right of the bat.  This is a growth process, and you have to monitor and measure your performance during the journey of achieving your goals.
4. You need to focus. Don’t overwhelm yourself with many things to do. This will not work. You need to do the job one task at a time. When you focus on something, your mind will be ranking things regarding to their importance.  To prioritize my goals. I usually ask myself this question, “What is the highest rate of return on this action?” My mind, with all these hundred of things to do, usually gives me some kind of blueprint to rank the most important actions, allowing me to focus like a laser beam.
5. You need to push yourself through your self-dout.  Nobody, and I mean nobody, on this earth does not have self-doubt — no matter how confident you are.   Our mind shoots these doubting questions all of the time.  It is a part of what scientists call risk assessment.  Your lizard brain works hard to protect you from foolish steps.  Being mindful about the self-doubt allows you to deal with your fears better.
6. You have to add value.  Meaning, when you work on a task or a goal,  you need to give value to other people.  Steve Jobs worked very hard to build Apple which gave significant value to his customers.  You need to evaluate the end product of your service by estimating the value. You need to ask yourself:  Is it worth doing and how much value will it produce?”
7.  You have to create or synthesize an idea.  Meaning, you need to listen, observe, be curious, ask questions, solve problems, and make connections between things which were not clear, connecting the dots to get something new with value.
8. Be persistent.  Don’t give up when you fail. You need to handle criticism and rejection. You need to push through the pressure and the poisonous people who try to stop you and harass you on your journey.  My advice is that you need to be very careful about the people around you, who are called friends.  Examine your friends. Are they taking you down or up?  Stay away from bad friends as far as possible.  Dysfunctional friends with misery like their friends to be dysfunctional as well and have the same miseries.

These eight pillars will lead you to success as Dr. John highlighted in his TED talk, and I am sure you will be happy during the journey to achieve your goals.

This blog is usually written on Saturdays. I would love to hear from you. Please email me at Sufalkhaldi@FutureandScienceHacks.com