Growing up I watched adults around me always seeming to get everything right and understanding exactly how to act and how to manipulate their world while things seem difficult and new for me. So I built an idea that 'When I am an adult, I too will know everything!'.
But as I was growing I started to see that I STILL didn't know what was going on half the time. I still wasn't as successful as I wanted to be. I still struggled and made things up as I went along. So I decided that I should just look around at successful people and follow and copy them and then I will be on the right track. Because surely if they are successful they must know what to do? Right?
So I would read books by successful people on how they did it, I would read self-help books that promised happiness, success, achievement, everything. I follow sayings such as 'I never dreamed about success, I worked for it'. And yet I was still not succeeding.
So I concluded I was broken. I was destined for failure since I did everything the books and other successful people recommended and I still wasn't successful.
What I didn't realise until far too late is that there are no rules in life. There is no one 'correct' way to do things that successful people know and the rest don't. There are things that help you achieve of course, but success is a result of a million factors, some within your control and understanding and some out of it. Even successful people don't know all the factors that made them successful.
There was a study that showed we attribute our success to hard work and failure to forces outside our control. So that means that when a successful person writes a book where they say they succeeded due to their hard work, they are displaying 'lucky fool syndrome'. What you don't see is all those that worked just as hard but did not succeed and as such did not write a book (or at least one you would be interested in reading and learning from!) You also don't see all the forces outside their control that contributed to their success. They are not lying by not adding that information. But they might not even be aware of these external forces. And also, it is far more glamorous to say you overcame the incredible odds stacked against you rather than your success was a result of many factors, including luck.
So what does all that mean? What do you do?
You do you. You shift your mind to see that you are the same as everybody else. The successful ones and the unsuccessful ones. It is important to learn from others, so keep reading those books, of course! But realise that they were winging it as well and if you fail to replicate their results it is not because YOU are just a failure. You don't know the full story. Neither do they for that matter.
So continue learning, trying, failing, succeeding, repeating, learning. Just while you are doing it remember that thats exactly what the successful people did as well.
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