I want to
be more
successful
by Rose Cartwright,
VisualDNA Life Coaching Editor
and Jonathan Davidoff,
MA, Honorary Psychotherapist
and Research Psychologist

“I want to be
more successful”
We’re often taught that success defines us. As
children we're weaned onto the notion that our
self-worth is dependent on how successful we are.
When we do something successfully our whole
person is given a global rating: ‘good boy,’ we’re
told when we answer a question right; ‘good girl’,
they say when we pet the long-suffering cat more
gently. It’s no surprise, then, that you’re here trying
to find out how to be a “success”, but before we go
any further, it's worth reassessing what that means.
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What to do
at a glance
Don't be “a Don't brand yourself as a success or a failure
success”, do according to the things you achieve. Sometimes
successful things you'll succeed, sometimes you'll fail.
Forget the People who don't succeed are often just as
winning formula ambitious/motivated/assertive as those who do.
Clarify Set goals according to the kind of person
your values you'd like to be, rather than the kind of
things you'd like to achieve.
Actualise Make success a pleasant by-product of
self-actualisation.
I want to be more successful Page 2

Don't wait for Get inspired on the job, not from your
inspiration living room.
Take action A great product needs a great idea, but an
unrealised idea means nothing.
Do things. Publicise yourself. Make your work known
Tell people. to the world.
Take Empower yourself by claiming ownership
responsibility over your own successes and failings.
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Don't be “a success”,
do successful things
As a fallible human, you've done good things and bad
things. Maybe you succeeded in attaining As in your
GCSEs, and since failed in a professional capacity
somewhere. You can't be said, therefore, to be either
wholly successful or wholly a failure – you've done
successful things and you've done unsuccessful things.
Let's explore the importance of this distinction with a
little exercise:
Think of one person whom popular opinion
considers thoroughly evil – Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, etc.
Do a bit of research into that person's history – their
childhood, their relationships, what they did before
they were infamous. Look for any evidence of
tenderness, positive deeds or likeable traits; and make
a list of them. (Hitler, for example, was lovingly
devoted to his mother).
Humanistic psychologists such as Carl Rogers
argue that if we are able to recognise that good deeds
have been done by even the most 'evil' individuals, it
follows that no one can be totally evil.
We can co-opt this logic when we talk about
I want to be more successful Page 4

success and failure. Labeling yourself as a 'success'
or a 'failure' is a dangerously absolutist way of
thinking, because our whole being becomes defined
by what we've done or haven't done. Is it not much
more healthy (and human) to concede that seeing as
success is tenuous, and liable to change, no person
can ever really be an absolute 'success'? Why on
earth is this a good thing? Because it means we can't
be absolute 'failures' either. We can (and will) fail,
but our whole lives can't be defined by those acts.
In your efforts to do more successful things, cut
yourself a bit of slack and allow yourself to fail
sometimes.
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Forget the winning
formula
The bookshop shelves are packed with bestselling
self-help guides extolling the qualities possessed by all
successful people. There are even self-help guides
about how to write successful self-help guides. And
they all seem to agree that successful people are:
ambitious, frugal, willing to take risks,
self-motivated, tenacious, assertive, passionate
Be more like them, we’re told, and you’re more
likely to succeed. But because so much
self-development literature only focuses on successful
people, they miss the glaring fact that unsuccessful
people are just as likely to possess these qualities. It's
called the survivor bias – analysis focuses only on
those that have survived or succeeded.
A ‘failure’ doesn’t necessarily fail because they
lack any of the above, they fail because they made bad
decisions, or did stupid things, or just because
they're—well—human.
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People often fail, in fact, because they're far too
ambitious, frugal, passionate, etc. So breathe easy and
stop chasing the elixir, because there is no ‘winning
formula’ which defines success.
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Clarify your values
As long as it's something you passionately want, not
something you absolutely need, you can start taking
practical steps to attain success. Start by clarifying
your values.
Instead of setting goals which you consider the
benchmarks of success, make a list of the values
which you think drive those goals. Why do you want
that promotion at work? What are your deepest
desires for your own behaviour? Re-write your distant
goals into behaviours you can achieve in the present.
For example:
Replace ‘I will get promoted to the top of my
company’ with ‘I will try to work diligently every day'
Replace “I will lose a stone in the next four months”
with “I will try to stick to my exercise plan”.
Replace “I will have a girlfriend by the end of the
year” with “I will try to be open and receptive when
meeting new people”.
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These goal-alternatives are not finite. They are not
achievable in any concrete sense. But living by them
and abandoning the cyclical and seldom-satisfying
pursuit of definable success, is paradoxically more
likely to bring about that very thing.
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Actualise
American psychologist Abraham Maslow also
rejected a concrete definition of success, defining it,
instead, as a state of 'self-actualisation' – living
creatively and using your full potential. This state
sits at the very top of his famous Hierarchy of
Needs, and refreshingly, he found examples of it
flourishing in people from all walks of life: rich and
poor, famous or unknown, textbook 'successful' or
otherwise. To become self-actualised, Maslow
posited, you need to do the following:
Have a grip on reality. Exercise good judgement and
learn to recognise when you're being spun a yarn.
Accept your flaws. Get to know your imperfections.
Contrary to much self-help literature, an 'I can do
anything' mentality is rarely helpful.
Be spontaneous. Exercise unprompted expressions
of creativity.
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Be autonomous. Don't rely on anyone else to dictate
your sense of self worth.
Revel in solitude. Entertain yourself.
Self-actualisers have healthy relationships with those
around them, but also enjoy their own company.
Be empathetic. Learn to see situations from other
points of view.
Have a sense of humour. Don't take yourself too seriously.
Whatever your definition of success may be, the
theory goes, you can meet it by self-actualising – by
'becoming everything that one is capable of
becoming', as Maslow said. Work towards harbouring
the above attitudes, and success will be a pleasant
by-product.
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Don't wait for inspiration
You know when you're a teenager and you decide, one
afternoon, that today is the day when you're finally
going to come up with that million-selling invention,
that product so innovative that no-one's ever thought
of it before? So you sit down and you rub your temples
and you say 'think, think, THINK', and nothing comes
to you? That's because successful ideas often don't
come about in this detached manner. Most people
learn on the job and innovate as they go, so don't wait
for the light bulb moment, because you could be
waiting a long time.
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Take action
Ever heard anyone crane back skeptically from a
modern art painting in a gallery and say 'I could have
done that.' To them we say 'Maybe you could, but you
didn't.' And that's a crucial paradigm shift if you want
to get the core of success.
Take an artist like Modrian. Arguably, the
physical execution of his paintings wasn't too
complex. Perhaps you could have created something
similar, provided with a ruler and the right paints;
but being successful is about so much more than
having the right tools. Arguably his idea to create
non-representational artwork of black grids and
primary colours wasn't genius either. But success is
also about more than ideas. It's about the realisation
of ideas, and the relationship between ideas and
action. Ideas need realising and realisations need
ideas. Simply sitting there won't do either.
I want to be more successful Page 13

Do things, tell people
On one rather unassuming webpage with a
cumbersome domain name,
(carl.flax.ie/dothingstellpeople.html), student and
game developer Carl Lange boldly states 'Do things,
tell people. These are the only things you need to do
to be successful.' And we think he's got a point. If
Mondrian's paintings were still shrouded in a loft
somewhere, the artist wouldn't have been nearly as
successful. So follow Lange's advice and make sure
you vocalise your endeavours:
Come up with a thing you can talk about –
something about which you're passionate, whether it
be a new invention, a business model, or a new
variety of prize-winning marrow.
Attend industry events within your field, where
there'll be people who are likely to be interested in
your thing.
Make contacts. Make friends. Tell people about
your thing. If it's something you're passionate about,
that bit should come easily.
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Next time any of those people hear anything
related to your thing, the first person they'll think
about is you.
It's less about what you do, Lange argues, and
more about 'how you travel the entrepreneurial
landscape'. You could have the biggest marrow
known to man, but if you don't wield it skillfully in
the relevant market, it'll come to nothing.
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Take responsibility
The curious rise of Australia's biggest travel agent,
Flight Centre, is often cited as a success story. Bill
James and Screw Turner, two young Australians who
were living in London in the early 1970s, took a risk in
1973 and used the last of their savings to buy a 1950s
double decker bus. They fitted it with bunk beds and a
kitchen and started a humble tour company, Top
Deck, which drove experience-hungry young travelers
from London to Sydney. They expanded the company
successfully and later founded Flight Centre, which
turns over millions of dollars each year.
Bill James tells their story in Top Deck Daze. The
book is an important lesson in ballsiness in business,
but it's more so a lesson in being willing to fail, and
accepting responsibility for risk. At every stage of the
business' growth, James takes responsibility for the
bogusness of his plans, and as he employs more
people, he is all too aware that a wrong move (his own
wrong move) could disrupt many people's lives, not
least his own.
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When striving for success, make sure you're
prepared to fail. Write down a list of all your failings
in the last year, no matter how minor. Even if it was as
simple as arriving late to work. Next to each point,
write down exactly how you were culpable for that
failing. It might not have been your fault that there
were roadworks that morning, but it was still your
responsibility to get to work on time.
This exercise shouldn't be a downer. Remember,
you're not a failure just because you fail sometimes.
Rather, it should empower you into taking control of
your own successes and failings, and re-emphasise the
fact that you're the only person who can ultimately
determine them.
I want to be more successful Page 17

I want to be more successful Page 18

Continue your journey
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about who we are and what we do
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I want to be more successful Page 19

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I want to be more successful Page 20

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