By Henry Ukazu

Greetings Friends,

The dream of every progressive mentor or parent is for the mentee or child to be greater than him or her. Anybody who wants to be greater than whoever succeeds him/her doesn’t have the interest of the successor at heart. One of the best ways to access the performance of an out-going leader is to look at who succeeds him or her.  If you’ll agree with me success brings joy and fulfillment in life. However, succeeding in life requires a lot of work namely: sacrifice, handwork, patience, connections, God factor, persistence/consistency, determination, and knowledge amongst other attributes which you can add.

We all want to succeed, but the question you need to ask yourself is, are you willing to do the work? If you really want to succeed in life you have to dare to succeed. By daring to succeed, you must be courageous. It takes courage to succeed in life. Nor matter what you are doing in life, it takes courage to succeed. This is because you must get many no’s and a few yes, but all you need is one yes to succeed. For you to truly succeed, it takes courage. It takes courage to be exceptional, rich, knowledgeable, and truthful in the society in which we live.

While in High schools and College we always have the desire to study a particular major in addition to working in a particular industry. While working in a particular industry most times we have a plan of where we want to be in five and ten year’s time. After college, we step into the labor market to get our dream job, sometimes we don’t even get the desired job we need, even at that, we have plans of getting the desired job of interest that will be fulfilling. When these plans don’t go as planned, some of us do give up, while some still forge ahead with determination to get to the peak of our career and passion in life.

In order to succeed, we need to be persistent and consistent because persistency comes from consistency, you need to continuous practice, you need to be focused and you need to learn something new every day. Your determination to succeed must always supersede your fear of failure. Daring to succeed requires risk, you don’t have to wait to see the clear picture before you hit the ground moving. If you are truly hungry for success, you must seek to stand out, you don’t have to conform to the ordinary standard of docile people who sometimes have an entitlement mentality, you must seek to leave your conform zone.

One of the strongest advice I have always given to friends and clients is considering those who have believed in you by sacrificing and supporting them and also looking at those who want to see them fail. You can’t afford to fail your mentors, parents, friends and even your children and mentees who are strongly looking up to you. When you give up, you give cause to people to question your ability to succeed.

Be informed, you didn’t come into this world to conform, neither did you come in to fit in. You must have the courage to go after your dream. The courage to succeed in life can be challenging when you have many obstacles and competition, however, there’s always a room if you strongly believe you are called to be in that industry. Speaking about courage, this is an uncommon inner strength to thread in strange lands. Just like Thomas Dexter Jakes Sr. aka TD Jakes said in one of this messages I recently listened to, “It doesn’t matter how saturated the room is, if God has God called you, there’s room for you.

In my first published book, Design Your Destiny – Actualizing Your Birthright To Success, the cardinal message inherent in the book is you hold the keys to your success. Let me share some insights on how you can dare to succeed in life from Lahcen Haddad, a former Minister of Tourism from the Government of Morocco

1. Don’t be afraid to fail The fear of failure is a hidden fear of success. Take big strides, jump higher, and dare to challenge conventional wisdom and common sense. If you don’t risk anything, you won’t gain anything. As Jack Canfield said, “Everything you want is on the other side of fear.” Mandela spent 27 years in jail but refused to give up the struggle against apartheid, when presented with a fudged compromise. He was not afraid to say no and remain in jail, knowing that behind the indomitable image of fear and failure lies the bright picture of success.

2. Great success is built on great failures Robert Kennedy once said that “only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” If you want humans to get to Mars or Venus, you need to be prepared to get space missions to fail, shuttles to never reach destinations, technological devices to explode in the wide space, and obstacles to emerge by the hour, if not by the minute. Because your dream is big, so are your failures to achieve it. See your big failures as great lessons to learn. The Jamaican Usain Bolt, the greatest sprinter of all time, once said, “I don’t think limits,” meaning that his dream to be a hero doesn’t know limits, but only open vistas, limitless horizons. If you think limits, you create psychological hurdles to success. Dream big, fail big and enjoy huge successes all through.

3. Failure is the mother of inventiveness Thomas Edison said that he had not failed, but had found thousands of ways what he had invented did not work. Experimenting and failing, again and again, is common to the great inventors who have changed our lives forever. Electricity in every home, thousands of planes buzzing in our skies on a daily basis, comfortable cars making far places within our reach in a few hours, smartphones making the world available to us through small screens that we gently tap with one finger, sophisticated machines that scan our bodies for malfunctions or illnesses, and a million other inventions- all of these would not have been possible if the inventors did not accept the rule that “if you don’t fail and learn, you cannot succeed.”

4. Failure is success suspended, until the moment is ripe Sometimes we fail because we are ahead of our time, or because we are getting there but we need to think harder, work harder, and be more persistent. As Denis Waitley said, “Failure is a delay, not defeat.” It is a matter of finding the right solution for the right problem and selling it to the right people, in the right conditions. The recipe to success takes special ingredients, and every minute and detailed dosage when it comes to seasoning. Failure can be intrinsic to the solution itself, but it may be also a problem of packaging, marketing, and communication. Therefore, failure is a matter of time- finding the right recipe to make the solution attractive and sellable in a timely fashion. Timing is key. Try again later but never give up.

5. You can know success only if you have experienced failure The best perspective on success is through failure. “Its failure that gives you the proper perspective on success,” as Ellen DeGeneres said. Success is built on held assumptions and found solutions. Some assumptions work and others don’t. Therefore, every failed attempt gives you a sense of what doesn’t work and what should work. Failure gives you perspective, it helps you focus and hone in on the right obstacles and the right solutions- things you could not have seen, had you not failed, had you not made assumptions that did not work.

6. it’s okay to make mistakes, it’s NOT okay not to learn from them Mistakes are the imperfections that push us to aspire to perfection. In fact, they are not mistakes. They are our life lessons about what works and what does not work. That is why it is imperative to study our falls and our mistakes carefully to learn from them, to understand what could be key to success. As Henry Ford said, “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.” Study carefully what does not work: therein lie the seeds that make you successful.  The secret to achievement is made up of failures understood as warm-up exercises designed to help you learn to jump higher, aim better and get it right.

Success is a dream. But the road to success is paved with bold moves and brave acts. You have to risk something if you want to get something. In so doing, you are more vulnerable because you are exposed to danger, factoring in failure in a key characteristics of the bold entrepreneurs. Yes, they are afraid; but they know that overcoming fear can only happen when they espouse it and own it; if they fall, their fear does not grow; on the contrary, they become bolder, braver; they are vulnerable to bigger falls but also to greater achievements. Success is a thousand failures turned into a thousand lessons that allow you to overcome fear and catch the dream as it flies by you in a dark night. Don’t be afraid to fail; be ready to succeed.

How do you dare to succeed: Let’s see what Madanmohan Rad have to say:

 Dare

Dreaming is essential to make meaning of life, find your inner voice, truly grow up, and show the next generation how to dream. “Dreaming is an inalienable right,” says Johnson. Though difficulties and challenges may take us off course in life, it is important to make meaning of these challenges by daring to dream again.

Dream

You must boldly follow your dreams as well: become the hero of your story; make space and time for your dreams; map and track your competencies; know your beliefs; build on your strengths; and fine-tune your dreams as you align them with current circumstances.

Reflecting on childhood experiences and happiness is a good way to begin understanding your dreams. Through the twists and turns of life, it is necessary to embrace one’s constraints and even tap ‘fortunate frustrations’ by downsizing, re-directing or deferring dreams.

Introspection helps reveal your own innate talents, accumulated competencies, beliefs and identities. Some deeply-held beliefs put boundaries on dreams, others are scaffolding. For people of many faiths, their religion is a source of drive and values.

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Having fleshed out your dreams, you need to embrace discovery, explore your domain, create your dream team, bootstrap your dream, and ‘date’ or dabble with your dreams. Making dreams come true calls for support from mentors, experts, fellow dreamers, and cheerleaders. Dreams can also change via serendipitous un-anticipated events

In conclusion, if I ask you, what is the one thing you cannot fail in life, what will be your response? Again, what is the one thing you have always wished to do in life? I encourage you to, therefore, take the bold step and dare to succeed in any dream, vision and mission you strongly believed you cannot fail it.

Henry Ukazu writes from New York. He works with New York City Department of Correction as the Legal Coordinator. He’s the author of the acclaimed book Design Your Destiny – Actualizing Your Birthright To Success.