Looking for success? Show up!
Today I am going to show you how a few hours a week can set you on a path to success. As I sit here with a bad cold and a fever, uncomfortable, I can not help but want to go back to sleep. And then I think about you, the reader of this newsletter and the time you take out of your day to read these lines. You showed up, it would be disrespectful for me not to.
Everyone online talks about how they can help you achieve unimaginable heights. And most of them are correct, but they can not do anything about it if you do not want it.
If success is important to you, you need guidance at the beginning. I have been looking for guidance for years in the wrong places or refused to understand when I actually found someone worth listening to. I will tell you my mistakes, so you do not make them.
Most people look for shortcuts, ways to fast-track progress or immediate results. This does not work if you are looking for a stable and long-term successful path in life. I have been looking for fast-track success for over 10 years. Does that sound fast?
You will fail at success if you do not focus, bring value consistently, show up for the people who follow you and constantly improve.
As humans, we like structure but we lack discipline inherently. Here are some tactics to apply for a successful life:
- Learn to invest in yourself
- Build the brand of you
- Learn to invest in others
- Learn from failures, improve and push forward
- Prioritise value over wealth
And the most important part for all of the above, be consistent and show up for your tribe.
1. You are your biggest asset
It is important to have a stable income and a good career. In the beginning perhaps, but with time we stop moving forward. We work at our jobs and build our careers, but we stop improving ourselves.
With a false sense of improvement that we get from our career growth, we stop investing in ourselves. We stop learning and experimenting with ideas and things outside of our careers. This leads to stagnation and a false sense of progress.
Nobody is irreplaceable. Do you really think you have a stable job? There is no guarantee you will not lose it tomorrow. Literally tomorrow this could happen.
We live in a false security bubble and it can burst at any moment.
BUT the one thing you can count on is YOU!
As you keep investing in your self-development, as you learn new skills, and as you remove yourself on purpose from your comfort zone, you will grow. and NOBODY can take away your knowledge and your skills away from you. Nobody and not at any time.
I have reached great heights in my career. I became an Architect and worked with amazing companies and people. And that is awesome. In the end, however, when life threw me a very unpleasant surprise, everything I worked at for more than 15 years was crumbling.
I worked 16-hour days for years to build other people’s dreams and when I finally started to work on mine, I felt like I was not ready.
Action item: Get out of your comfort zone, do not limit yourself to the skills needed for your job only. Start learning more, build various skills, and build your network. This will serve you more than you realize.
Which brings me to my next point…
2. People are looking for you
Just as I was searching for teachers and mentors for years, every second people are looking for help all around the world.
I am not exaggerating. Literally every second there is a person out there who is looking for advice, help, for knowledge and you already have what it takes to help them.
Why would you want to do that?
Well, for one I would like to think people are good at their core, and just that alone should be satisfying enough. And also since we have a pragmatic side to us, well, when you start helping others, you become automatically their guide.
Being a guide is scary at first, but if you come from an honest place and you truly learn to want to help people, you will find yourself. You will find ways to help others and more important people will find you.
I started being a trainer and guide, and I think I was very bad at it. But I did and still do have the best interest at heart for the people I train and help. I think this is what made people stick around and eventually allowed me to understand my mistakes and become good at helping others.
Action Item: You have to start building the Brand-of-You, to become a recognizable authority, and most importantly teach yourself to help others. To come from a good place and sacrifice time to assist your tribe.
And with that in mind, let’s see how that can benefit you.
3. Invest in others to invest in yourself
I mentioned above “sacrificing time”, but I prefer much more the idea of investing time in others. And this, in turn, you will eventually realize, is investing time in yourself.
We are trained from an early stage in our lives to become specialists, and to work as a team, but ultimately we are taught to compete. I believe this is what makes it hard for us to rewire our way of thinking to a more “give” mentality versus a “do whatever it takes” to succeed mentality. Teamwork becomes a path to our personal success.
Only when we understand how to selflessly give and bring value to those around us will we truly understand how to grow ourselves.
This was perhaps one of the hardest lessons for me to master, and I am still learning how to do it properly after all these years. My wiring is still fighting the initial mindset programming I received during my formative years, but once you learn how to identify those thoughts and isolate them, you can course correct and go back to being a mentor and a teacher.
Action Item: It will be uncomfortable at first, because it might not be natural to you, but try to find a group or a mentoring program where you can volunteer your time to help others. You will learn it is rewarding beyond what you can imagine. And with time you will notice how you grow as a professional as a result of that.
Once you spend some time teaching others, you will want to do more of that, and in order to optimize the time you need to invest in it, I recommend you systematize your process.
4. Build a framework and use it
We think we are chaotic as humans. And in a sense we are, but we are still following a certain system. A certain programing. That is how our brain works, and that is how we cope with stress and the unknown. We revert back to our own internal framework.
Frameworks make it easy for our brain to understand things, and to be at ease. If you think about any knowledge transfer medium, such as courses or books, these are all structured in a certain way. Courses have modules, and books have chapters. We learned to expect that because that is how we think and in that we find comfort.
When we break down anything we do into small reproducible chunks, we can find a pattern. Based on that patterns we can create a framework.
As you help more and more people, you will be able to find your unique pattern of how you do that. Based on that, once you break the process down and then build a framework around it, things will become more clear for you and the people you are helping.
This will allow you to create a system that will require a lot less time invested and provide similar results, if not better.
And at that point, you can scale. At that point, you can touch more people and improve the lives of a lot more knowledge seekers.
Sometimes, you have to slow down, take a moment to step back, analyze the process, take it apart, improve where needed, and put it back together better than before.
Most of us realize too late that a process needs to be improved. We are so deep in the weeds when delivering our training, that we forget to take a breather and spend some time to analyze what we can do better.
Action item: Take a break. Analyze more in-depth what your process is. Listen to feedback from your tribe and figure out a better way to serve your tribe. Ultimately, you will not be able to scale and grow yourself without a framework in place.
5. Learn to give and to become a leader
As you start to invest in yourself, and your personal growth, as you step out of your comfort zone and despite your fear of feeling like an imposter you help and train others, you will eventually learn to lead your tribe.
It is not something that you take, it is someone you become.
Remember, as you learn to teach others by coming from a place of wanting to do good, selflessly, you will become your best self.
If there is one thing I can guarantee, is that you will change. People want to be managers and leaders, but few understand what that means.
A leader helps people succeed, picks them up when they are down, feels their pain and shares it, all while finding the strength to push forward through the hard times. To guide through uncertain times. To inspire when they themselves are lost.
Leadership can be lonely sometimes, but the rest of the time, it is the most exhilarating feeling to see your tribe succeed.
TL;DR (too long; didn’t read)
Mindset means a lot and I hope you read the above. But if you want just the action items, here is how the above translates into the Salesforce ecosystem:
- Keep learning, for yourself, not for your job. Learn new skills, and expand your knowledge. Go to https://trailhead.salesforce.com/, sign up and start if you haven’t already.
- Join a few Trailhead Groups and go through the Community section on Trailhead. There you will be able to learn and help others.
- Answer Community questions, and sign up to mentor someone here https://trailhead.salesforce.com/trailblazerconnect/mentorship/. Or sign up to be a mentee so that you can learn how it is done.
- Find your own voice as a teacher. Help others, improve your process and eventually create a framework to be able to teach others more efficiently
- Learn to be kind, to be a leader.
Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways I can help you improve your career:
- Request to join our free and new Facebook Community – Mekanys Academy, and let’s talk
- Read the Success Secrets book (coming out soon). Subscribe here to be notified when it is out
- Fill in an application to one of our Career Success cohort training
