People like to read about stories of the past, preferably success stories. There can be multiple reasons behind this. Some people read it for motivation, some read it to learn something practical from it, some for other reasons, etc.
If you find a person who read tens of those success stories and asks him to form a metastory out of it (metastory here means a boiled down, compounded version of all the stories), he or she might not be able to say anything. It’s understandable because every story is different. The plot is different, the environment is different, the time is different, different problems, different heroes, and hundred other distinct features.
But believe it or not, there are many common things you can point out in such stories, one of which we are going to talk about here.
. . .
Let’s start by asking ourselves, how a hero becomes a hero in stories. But since our stories are stories of the past, we can expand our question to
How a successful person becomes successful in real life?
Or, how a winner becomes a winner in real life? How exactly do they begin to move towards their goal?
Let me give some examples and let’s see if you can figure it out. Can you figure out the Highest Common Factor in all of them?
The rise of personal computing was about to start during the teen years of Bill Gates. In those days, people were not able to get their hands on computers for personal use but because of his good fortune, Mr Gates got his hands on a computer. And what did he do with it? He worked on himself and learned how to code. Most people today know him as a businessman but he was a brilliant programmer even before programming was considered a cool thing.
The Beatles, the rock band from Liverpool in the ’60s, were still considered as one of the most successful bands of all time. But it was not overnight. Even before people began noticing them, they had more than 1000 hours of stage shows. Most artists today, in their entire life, are not able to do that much.
Mahatma Gandhi, who even today, is the torchbearer of non-violence returned to India in 1915 and become a national symbol in 3 years. But if anybody knows anything about India, it is that it is huge. So, how can someone rose so suddenly to fame, that too without Internet? Because even before the world knew him, he was experimenting with his philosophy of non-violence in South Africa for 20 years.
And the list will go on. If I sit here writing about all of them, it would take a whole book. But the important thing is, are you able to figure out the common factor in all the cases?
. . .
In all these three cases, even before that person came into the eyes of the common, they were working. Working on what? Working on themselves. Either they were practising some hard skills like programming and music, or some soft skill like leadership.
Think about it this way, there are almost 8 billion people on this planet. Can you focus on all of them at once? Obviously no, that’s not even a valid question.
So who can you focus on? Someone who is on the top of their field.
And who rose to the top of their field? Someone who has been working on themselves even before the world noticed him.
And that is the highest common factor in all the success stories, at least the ones which are worth imitating.
That is how the world works. If you have something important to do, make sure to work on yourself first. Because once you made yourself into a strong base, you can carry a team, an organization, even an entire country on your shoulders. But if the base is not strong, everything which is built on it will eventually fall.
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This post was previously published on Change Becomes You.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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