Success in life is an individual determination. Evidence comes in every day when a wealthy, much loved celebrity claims dissatisfaction with their failure to achieve goals that were personal and very important to them. When a Bernie Maddoff continues to take money, breaking the law and ruining lives, there is some compulsion to meet some impossible and twisted standard for ultimate success. Many individuals develop new goals and dreams, never ending their journeys toward success.

Thus, to achieve success in life, there needs to be periodic and deep reflection on past successes, resolving vague and unspecific definitions of “success”, getting over any failures, and good understanding of the specific tasks, behaviors and passions needed to be successful at something. Finally, a human life can rarely be described as “successful” because there will always be specifics, and there will never be an overall measurement or judgment that applies to all of a person’s endeavors. 

Passion

Passion is the driving force behind success in most endeavors. Even a criminal or a cheat has a passion for committing crime and cheating. Without passion, a person cannot push past the disappointments or bear the drudgery that is often required to meet the most desirable goals. It is best to follow multiple passions in the event that one goal is put on hold or another goal runs into barriers that will take time to overcome. When a person always have something to work on that they are passionate about, that person will be working toward one success or another.

Curiosity

A lack of curiosity about a field of study, an opportunity, a work process, and other areas will shut a person out of the grand avenues or the tiny back streets that lead to success. A lack of curiosity can also lead a person to mistakes, poor decisions and other paths to failure. With curiosity about rocks, a person does not need to become a geologist, but can go on to pay more attention to rocks that can become jewelry, a great hobby, or good investments. Curiosity about the news can prepare a person for events that come up in the course of time. Curiosity about a problematic issue can lead to resolving the issue before it grows into a larger problem. Curiosity leads to discovery and discovery can lead to success.

Focus

Only one flaw is worse to hear about than “I don’t have time to…”. What the speaker often means is that they do not want to focus on something for a long period of time. Or, the person does not want to focus frequently and thoroughly on something. Focus leads to skills development, satisfying curiosity, becoming expert, being knowledgeable or being successful at the endeavors in life that require study and practice. 

Determination

This is the flaw that is worst of all. A lack of determination is never clearly stated, but that is why so many people “always wanted to…”. Artists hear this so frequently that it must be a global human disorder. Lack of determination can come from serious disappointment of expectations in childhood or earlier in life.

The safest route is to resist trying again rather than to experience the trauma all over again. The successful route is to fix the internal problems. Lose the weakness, cure the ignorance, practice until the skill is gained, take a class, demand encouragement and fight discouragement.

When the roadblock is external, demand the correct answers and the help that is needed. Examine the roadblock in a calm and objective fashion and figure out the best way to move that block so that the passage can continue.

Success is based on the determination to get past internal and external roadblocks and to continue until the end. Of course the end may mean failure but in far too many cases, the individual restarts and finishes their journey with satisfying results.

Knowledge, practice and experience

Knowing about the endeavor is an obvious need. This may mean learning from the bottom up. The most menial task, the most repetitive and boring practice, and the simplest lessons lead to experience and knowledge that will never be available to the person who never started at the beginning. The complex matrix of knowledge, practice and experience prepare the mind to resolve many issues that could be fatal to success if not handled well.

Leadership

Leadership can be easily summarized: Lead, follow, or get the heck out of the way. The real trick to leadership is in not making a mistake when deciding to lead, follow, or get the heck out of the way.

Many a great leader failed to step up at the right time and can only talk about success that never happened as an “If, then” proposition. Many a lousy leader drove an endeavor into the ground by forcing the better qualified individuals to follow.

Many people never learned how to be a good follower, and no great leader started out as a leader. They all started out as good followers, which gave them great understandings about the needs, mindsets and qualities of the people who follow them.

Satisfaction as a measure of success

Personal satisfaction that is in a healthy and beneficial form is a perfectly good reason to put an endeavor on the “successful” list. That is all.

Support

Some successful people are incredibly self sufficient and self contained. Other successful people have worked the systems of other people and of bureaucracies to get boosts along the way. Neither is a right or wrong way to go, but a combination of the three: self sufficiency, getting help from people at the right times, and working the systems is a great and flexible set of options when striking out on the path to success in an endeavor.

Summary

There is no singular set of qualities that make up successful people. This does not mean that thousands of writers, experts and convincing “success” advisers will ever stop trying to find that magic set of instructions or list of qualities to have. There is no such list because there is no overwhelming, global thing called “success” in a person’s life.

Every successful person is a bundle of failure, flaw, fault, badness, goodness and spectacular achievement. The worst that can happen is to decide that money, power or fame are the only determinants of success. It is conceivable that a blue collar family with healthy, educated, functional children and grandchildren, decent credit, a home, and secure retirement is as enormously successful as anyone with millions of dollars and tons of power.