My success maxims: There is no one definition of success. Despite what you may read, there is not a set of magical steps that will get you to success. You should never let anyone prevent you from getting to your success. There is only one person responsible for your success, you.
With that being said, here are my own principles that I follow and what I believe make me successful.
Choice and Discipline - Everything in life is a choice; your health, career, relationships and everything else. Depending on what you want to get out of life you will need to achieve certain things to get there. For example, if you want to be in good health then you're going to have to make a choice to eat a balanced diet and exercise. Now comes the discipline... You know what the choice should be to achieve good health, but do you have the discipline to stick with it every day, week, month, year and so on? If success is your goal, then discipline is essential to get there.
Success is being happy with my choices - The choices I make define who I am. I don't regret any choices I've made in my life, and for the choices that didn't turn out as I would have liked, I choose to learn from them rather than regret.
Balance is essential - So many people say they want balance but don't follow up, not me. An average weekday for me looks like this... Starting at 5AM after 7-8 hours sleep... Workout (45 min.), work with passion (9-10 hours), family time (2-3 hours), improve myself through reading, writing, hobby or anything (1 hour), leaving a couple hours for meals, travel or adding a bit to the other areas. Weekends, replace the work piece with family time. This is my balance.
Start with Why? - This is a relatively new principle for me, one that I picked up only a few months ago. It stemmed from a TED Talk that I watched of Simon Sinek titled "How Leaders Inspire Action". If you haven't watched it I highly recommend you do. The concept is that most people start with What, then How and finally (yet rarely) figure out with Why they do things. Simon says (no pun intended) start with Why? Then go to How and end with What. By starting with WHY you do something you will give meaning and purpose to everything you do; moreover, when you start with Why, the How and What take care of themselves.
Kaizen - Kaizen is a Japanese word for continuous improvement that means many things to me. Most significantly, kaizen is a passion to make things better, reflection, respect for others, knowing what I can influence and not allowing the things that I can't influence to affect me.
Be myself, everyone else is already taken - There's not much more I can say about this, it's pretty self explanatory.
Keep learning and reading - I read as much as I can, a chapter each day is my goal. I believe that in order to fuel personal growth and to keep my mind sharp that need to keep reading and feeding my brain. During an acceptance speech at the Teen Choice Awards, Will Smith talked about the keys to life being running and reading, check it out on Youtube.
Exercise - My gut feeling is that we all tend to ignore the fact that we're not going to live forever. On top of that, as we go through life we also tend to ignore our health until a health crisis forces us to change destructive habits or even worse, when it's too late for change. If you're one of these people it's never too late, and if you're not one of these people then I commend you. Regular exercise will not make you live forever, but it will definitely allow you to enjoy your time on this Earth with more energy and more years than if you don't achieve regular exercise.
I'll leave you with this... Don't settle for mediocrity. Find your success, whatever it is, and go get it.
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