The Road to Success Step Five: Lather, Rinse, Repeat

This is the final step in my Road to Success series.  (Can you believe it’s over already) Please feel free to comment or email me with other feedback.  I’m planning much bigger, more involved series down the road, so I’d be interested to get your take on the inaugural one.

So far you’ve recognized your fears, broken down your goals, became your own expert, and ignored everyone else’s rules.  So now what?

Now?  You refine.  The road to success is not a finite journey.  You have to keep refining your path.

Insanity

Einstein is often cited as having defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  The same is true of this process.

Just because you’ve ignored everyone else’s rules doesn’t mean you’ve succeeded.  You’re not entitled to success.  So if what you’re doing isn’t working after you’ve tried it once, please STOP IT…for my sake.

I had a conversation with a friend the other day that went something like this:

Friend: I just can’t believe no one is hiring me.

Me: How many interviews have you gone on?

Friend: None!  That’s the thing, I send my resume in and never hear anything back.  They should tell you that a college degree doesn’t mean that much before you spend so much money on it!

Me: Have you tried networking?

Friend: I don’t know anyone who can help me, I just need someone to give me a good job.  Otherwise why did I waste all this time and money on a degree?!

Read that over again.  Notice the amount of entitlement language.  This friend equates ANY work with work relevant to her goal.  She believes that because she spent 4 years working on a degree, that is equivalent to 4 years of trying to get a job.  In the end she only ever sent her resume in for positions that she could find through the internet.  Those public job postings are the equivalent of a resume landfill.  Most of the jobs aren’t even available, and if they are, you’re probably not going to get noticed sending in the same resume and cover letter as everyone else.

Never Even Got Started

After reading through this series, you should see that the first thing she should do is try something new.  She might as well just be throwing her resume down a well.  So why does my friend keep doing the same thing despite getting ZERO results from it?  She doesn’t know any other way.

She already has a goal (Getting a Job) but she has no intermediate goals, nothing discreetly measurable to guide her path.  In the end she feels like she’s failed completely, but in reality she never even got started.

So, if you’ve followed this guide and you still haven’t achieved your end goal, go back to your last successful mini-goal, and try starting from there, by breaking down your goal in a new way, and finding new tactics that still break all the rules.

Ask yourself: Did what you do today move you closer to achieving your goal?

If the answer is no, then it may be time to start the process over again.  Luckily, this is a process that you get better at the more you try, it’s why I’m such a big proponent of failure.

I’d love to hear from you, and hear about some of the successes you’ve had as a result of this series.  Feel free to share it in the comments or shoot me an email.
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