Success Advice
Why Success Is All About Other People
Every event that happens can be amplified by adding the magic ingredient of other people. You’ll never be successful if you go it alone and refuse to bring in your fellow human beings. Are you wondering why you’re bored or keep giving up on your goals?
It’s because you’re not leveraging those around you. We’ve all had a relatively boring experience happen to us and then done the exact same thing years later with a group of people and thought it was the greatest thing since Mexican burritos with tomato relish. The difference is people.
Here are 5 reasons why your success is all about other people:
1. Our energy feeds off each other
This whole concept of success is a strange one. I mean am I successful? Some days yes, other days no. It depends on what side of the bed I wake up on. What I do know though is that the energy we all need to be successful doesn’t come only from ourself; the energy we need comes from each other.
When someone high fives you, you feel pretty good. When a team of people high five you, you feel incredible. When you high five with yourself, you feel absolutely zero and probably pretty stupid too.
If you’re scratching your head and wondering why you’re bored and uninspired, it’s because you’re not tapping into the people around you. You’re being selfish and thinking that you can do it all.
You can’t. Massive success can only be achieved by compounding the energy and successes of everyone around you. Going at the struggle by yourself is ten times harder, and you’ll always be asking yourself why you’re failing.
Stop wondering, and leverage the people around you. Give them everything you have and let your own energy become infectious. Be the guy or girl that gives the bright spark that everyone needs to get going and to start the walk of a thousand miles.
2. Loneliness creates negativity
We’ve all had days where we can’t be bothered doing anything. Where we would rather eat chilli fries than bother spending a single minute on our dream. We’ve all been negative as hell for a day or longer and then scratched our head and wondered where this crazy lapse in awareness came from. All of it stems from the fact that our success is about other people.
Without embracing other people, we become lonely. When you’re lonely, you have this big gaping hole that is unexplained a bit like the whole big bang theory. You know you’re messed up, but you can’t understand why. Well, the answer my friends is that you’re lonely.
Your body is starved of the nutrition that is the people around you. Lonely people become bitter and twisted a lot of the time because they can’t figure out what’s wrong with them. They’re often not even aware that they’re lonely. They think thoughts like, “Everyone must be on coke because I’m freaking awesome and I’m never wrong.”
You’re probably like me and wrong all the time so just admit it pal! Until you understand where your negativity is coming from, and why you need other people to be successful, you’ll become like one of those cases out of the X-files that never gets solved. People will be at your funeral one-day thinking to themselves, “Why is the loss of Johnny Big Guns not hurting me like I thought it would.”
3. We’re programmed to connect
You, me, your family, we’re all just mammals baby so let’s do it like the do on the discovery channel (okay maybe not right now in front of all these people). The fact is we’re all mammals, and we were put here to struggle together not by ourselves. Our brains were programmed only to acknowledge the concept of success when we connect with lots of people.
The more we connect with our fellow mammals, the more we’ll feel successful and like we matter. That’s why we crave attention. We don’t want the eyeballs; we want the feeling of success that we get when we engage and build our lives around other people. Truth be told, it’s probably why I’m writing this blog post.
I couldn’t give two shakes about people’s attention, but I do care about being able to inspire all of you and help you crush your goals. Like you, all I want is a feeling of connection. It’s like an IV line of love that takes me to the next level in my game of success.
“Success is a game, and you make progress when you add more and more people to your cause”
4. Connection gives us fulfilment
Feeling good about ourselves often requires external validation. It would be nice to think that we could validate ourself and say, “yup approved.” The point you want to get to is where you don’t require external validation as a must, but when you get it, it takes you to level ten in your enthusiasm.
A feeling of connection with our fellow human beings makes us feel like we’re fulfilled. It gives us the hope that when we face a massive challenge (and we will) that others have our backs. I’ve had those hellish moments recently where I have achieved the impossible and obliterated my goals, and then being left wondering, “is this all there is?”
Upon reflection, I realised that achieving goals means jack unless you have the people to share the success with. It’s the success stories and people I can help that matter, not the stupid numbers of social media shares. Fulfilment is a measure of connection, and this is subjective from person to person.
5. Dreams need teams
If Mark Zuckerberg gave you the thousand steps to start the next Facebook-like social media platform, it wouldn’t be enough. The reason is because even if you had the exact strategy to be a billionaire just like Zuck’s, you don’t have the team of people to execute on all the action items.
This fact again points back to why you can’t be successful without other people. Building your entrepreneurial empire is going to be a gruelling task. It’s going to take every ounce of energy you have, and there are days when you’re going to feel like you can’s be assed.
It’s the champions that you surround yourself with that are going to beat you into shape again because their dream will be affected by your lack of action and care. Teams create a bond. Teams create leverage that goes beyond you to achieve something that by itself might seem impossible.
Even when you see the solo pianist perform in front of a sellout crowd, what you can’t see is the piano teacher, parents, friends, lighting teams, publicists, concert promoter, etc. that made them stand out in the first place. On the surface, success may seem achievable in a solo capacity. Believe me; it’s not. You can’t do it all superstar.