Stephen Pierce was in town yesterday. He had taken an earlier flight to Singapore due to a promotional tour of The World Internet Summit to be held here on Nov 25-28. We had a 24 hour notice that he wants to meet us all - students from his coaching class. An opportunity not to be missed, I quickly called my parents to babysit my kids for the evening workshop.
His lesson for the evening? Back to the fundamentals of becoming successful.
Many of us are mistaken in the belief that with time and money, we will attain success. So with time, we can employ traffic generating strategies all day long and/or with money, we can hire the best webmaster. We therefore give ourselves plenty of excuses that as we have no time or money, success has eluded us.
However, in Stephen’s opinion, that is hardly true at all. The most important key to becoming successful is self esteem. If we do not believe in ourselves that we can do it, then when obstacles come our way, we are likely to give up. For instance, how many of us get daunted by the use of software tools or in finding that SEO is just too complex so much so that we just give up the idea of getting a website going? Starting a website does not require all that much money or resources.
I am reminded again of the Stockdale Paradox in the book “Good To Great”. Admiral Stockdale was instrumental in coming up with a system of communication within the prison cells during Vietnam War. His valuable lesson was this: We may not know when we will achieve our goals, but we have firm belief that we can and will in the end. At the same time, we learn to cope and deal with the current reality of the situation. (If you want to read more about the Stockdale Paradox, please go to my blog on myspace.com/evelynlim).
Most of us may feel that our progess is slow. But we have to congratulate ourselves over all the little achievements that we have made so far: be it registering our first domain or earning our first dollar.
Very often, we get disenchanted with the negative side of things and when faced with challenges, we want to just give up. But really, whoever heard of success being so smooth sailing? No one just gets a big pot of gold without going through sweat and determination. A price chart that trends generally up still has its downs before continuing on its rise.
Boosting our self esteem is the key to becoming successful. Fix that and you will be a winner for sure! Stephen Pierce wasted no time in hammering this point through last evening.