By | Nicole Frazier | addicted2success.com
I get the feeling we’ve all heard what it takes to be successful. We’ve probably heard it time and time again. I would go as far as saying there isn’t a secret step, ingredient, or set of bullet points you need to follow to be successful.
If you had the opportunity to sit down and talk with successful people and ask them whatever you wanted about their success, do you think they would give a lot of the same answers? Maybe they wouldn’t give the same answers, but how about what characteristics or the “how did you become so successful?”
If you asked any top athlete, leader of an industry, mogul, or anyone that has achieved a level of success, I would be willing to bet they would all say, “they did whatever it takes to become successful.”
They would all probably say, it takes dedication, self-discipline, desire, working tirelessly, focus, and a whole list of other attributes we’ve all heard before. But the bottom line is, they did whatever it took to achieve their level of success.
And I’m talking about self-made women and men, not silver-spoon kids inheriting their wealth. Sure, some people were in the right place at the right time, but they all inevitably had to make sacrifices.
Why you need to sacrifice the short term for long term
What I’m driving towards is you need to sacrifice short-term gratification for long-term wins.
Over the past several decades, there have been numerous tests on delayed gratification. You may have heard of some of these tests.
To summarize, they would bring kids into a room, with some cookies on a table. They would explain to the kids, they can have one cookie now, or, if they wait 15 minutes, they could have two cookies. Naturally, some of the kids couldn’t resist and ate the cookie immediately, while other kids resisted the temptation and received the reward of two cookies after 15 minutes. The study goes on to show, the kids that were able to resist the immediate gratification, tended to have better SAT scores, better social skills, and were likely to achieve a level of success.
