Straightest Path to Success

The Orange Stack
Jul 3, 2018
3 min read

Success is something we all want. Whether in business, our social lives or any other area of life. We get up each day and put our best efforts to work hoping to meet success. But success can prove to be elusive. Think over the last two weeks; can you say you were successful? Can you honestly say that you did all you could to achieve success? Before we go further, it is important first to understand that taking time to reflect in this way is in itself an important step towards success. Now that you have looked back, let’s look forward. What are you doing to achieve success? Are your efforts and strengths aligned? To help get you into the right mindset and on the straightest path to success, keep the following three points in mind.

Magnify Your Strengths

Everyone is good at something. In fact, there are very few people who are good at many things. Even prodigies are often known for one overwhelming strength. So, what are you good at doing? And I mean at work. Do you great at making sales calls? Do you have a knack for picking the best business opportunities? Are you great at marketing? The reason most people struggle to succeed is they waste their efforts trying to improve what they are not good at instead of magnifying their strengths. This does not mean you do not try to improve your weaknesses. It just means that eighty percent of the time, you should be working on magnifying your strengths because that is where you can get a 10x return on your efforts.

Your Work Ethic Matters

The world today is full of all sorts of work hacks. How to do more this and how to be more productive that. Work ethic, however, is what has stood the test of time. Do you have the discipline to focus on getting a task done when you set your mind to it? Can you eliminate all the background noise and focus on getting the task at hand done? Can your clients count on you to deliver each time? These may seem like obvious things, but they aren’t. Having a strong work ethic will set you on the path to success and differentiate you from those that are always trying to take shortcuts.

Work Both Hard and Smart

You’ve heard this one before: don’t work hard, work smart. If you want the straightest path to success, you need to do both. The problem with focusing on working smart is sometimes laziness creeps in the form of smart working. You work three hours in the morning and then the rest of the time is spent doing “smart” things like updating to-do lists and checking boxes. I’m sorry to tell you that you are just wasting your time. In the history of work, those who outworked the rest won. This is the straightest path to success. If you have ten hours a day to work, squeeze in as much work as you can into those hours. Even if productivity hacks create more time for you, turn right back and plow in some more work into this extra time.

The most important thing to remember as you adopt these tactics is always to measure your progress. What you don’t measure, you cannot improve.