How to Succeed in Life: Examples & Tips

When we say that someone has succeeded in life, often what we mean is that they’re wealthy, famous, or extraordinarily skilled. “Successful” appears to be a descriptor that is reserved for people like Jeff Bezos, Kim Kardashian, or Kobe Bryant. In reality, success looks different for everyone. For some, success might be owning a yacht whereas, for others, success is simply being able to spend quality time with their loved ones.

The Greek Philosopher, Aristotle, defined a successful life as living in a way that aligns with your purpose. So, if you’re an artist and you make art, you’re successful. If you’re a dancer and you dance or a scientist and you do research, you’re successful. In other words, as long as you are moving through the world in a way that is true to you, you’re successful. You get to decide what you want out of life, what your personal values are, and what success looks like for you.

• Janae loves to travel. They found a flexible job that provides them the time and resources they need to travel the globe and now they get to go somewhere new every few months.
  
• Oliver is a painter. He has been painting for 30 years and for the first time, one of his pieces will be on display in a local art gallery.
  
• Minju is a dancer. She has been attending a dance studio for 5 years and was just offered a job as an instructor. Now she gets to dance every day and share her love for her craft with others.
  
• Carlos is a father, and his family means everything to him. He spends several hours every evening with his spouse and his children.
  
• Kayla loves science and is deeply motivated by the prospect of discovery. She just finished graduate school and is off to start a research position at her favorite university.
  

Understanding what your motivations are is a critical aspect of lifetime success. In other words, it’s important to explore what it is that really moves you rather than simply focusing on a desired outcome. For example, imagine a woman who has resolved to be able to run a half marathon so that she can share in her spouse’s passion for running. Her goal, of course, is to be able to run 13 miles, but her true motivation is connecting with her spouse in a new way. Focusing on this central motivation will make her much more likely to accomplish her goal (Ajzen, 2020).
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One theory of human motivation, called Self-Determination Theory, suggests that motivation comes from the desire to meet three needs: autonomy, relatedness, and competence (Ryan & Deci, 2000). 

Autonomy​
Autonomy is the need to feel like you are in charge of your own life, like your decisions are your own and no one else’s. Self-Determination Theory suggests that when your motivation is authentic (as opposed to being motivated by coercion from others) you have more interest, excitement, and confidence in your pursuit of your personal goals and move toward your goals with enhanced performance, persistence, and creativity.

Relatedness
Relatedness is the need to feel connected to others. Being a part of a community of similar others is one of our most basic human needs, which is why we tend to be more motivated in groups than when we are alone. If you’ve ever attended an exercise class or taken part in a study group, you’ve likely noticed the boost in motivation these groups can provide.

Though being part of a community can enhance motivation and perseverance, there are some social contexts that can have a negative impact on motivation. For example, while a supportive work environment in which you are surrounded by other people who share similar goals will enhance motivation, other work environments that are hyper-competitive and exclusive create a social context that is more likely to be demotivating and increase the chances of burnout.

Competence
The need for competence is basically the need to be good at something. Feeling like we are skilled or capable can lead to enhanced feelings of satisfaction, vitality, and well-being and can motivate us to seek further personal development (Legault, 2017). We all have a skillset of some sort. Whether our skill is engineering or knitting, we can use our existing competencies to help us feel motivated in other pursuits. For example, if you’re a good cook, recognizing and celebrating your culinary competence can help boost your self-esteem, which can make you feel more motivated to develop new skills.

There are many different strategies we can employ that will help us reach our life goals. Some strategies may work better for some people than others, so it is important to try them out to see which one works best for you. Here are a few examples:

Visualizing​
Visualization is an effective strategy that has been used in therapeutic contexts for decades to enhance cognitive, emotional, and behavioral change (Blackwell, 2019). When we visualize a particular action, our brains are essentially rehearsing that action. For example, neuroscience studies using brain imaging techniques have shown that when we imagine making a movement, our brains are activated in the same way that they would be if we were actually making that movement (Pearson et al., 2015). In the same way that imagining an action is a sort of mental rehearsal, we can use mental imagery to identify the discrepancies between our current selves and our ideal future selves, which can help inform the behavioral changes we need to make to succeed in our goals (Murphy et al., 2015).

We can also use visualization to help us foreshadow failure or other potential obstacles that may negatively affect the pursuit of our goals. That is, by imagining the steps we will need to take as we move toward our goals, we can identify possible outcomes or personal characteristics that we may need to manage or for which we may need to develop alternative plans or compensatory mechanisms.

A famous example of how foreshadowing failure can facilitate success is Michael Phelps in the 2008 Olympics. Phelps was competing for his 8th gold medal when his goggles flooded and he had to finish the trial without being able to see. Not being able to see where he was with respect to the wall was almost certainly disorienting and definitely dangerous as he ran the risk of slamming into the concrete wall at several miles per hour. This situation would have thrown most of his competitors into a panic, costing them valuable milliseconds and destroying their chance of winning. Michael Phelps, however, had foreshadowed this possibility and practiced swimming without his goggles. He learned that, if he happens to lose his goggles, he could count his strokes and know precisely how far from the wall he was. So, when the emergency situation came up, he knew exactly how to handle it and took home the gold because of it.
 
Make a Plan
Visualizing is only a first step toward succeeding in life. The next necessary step is to make a plan. We can use visualization to create a sort of rough draft of our plans, but when it comes to actually laying out our plans it is important that we get as specific and detailed as possible. Two helpful strategies for making plans and achieving our goals are to create subgoals and set deadlines.  
 
Create Subgoals
Success is predominantly achieved by taking several incremental steps toward a goal. For example, if your goal is to be an ultra-marathon runner, you might work toward this goal by setting short-term sub-goals like training every day and eating more healthful and nutrient-dense foods.

Research has shown that structuring a goal into a set of subgoals makes it easier to work toward your goal, enhances your self-efficacy, or your belief that you are capable of achieving your goal, and provides positive reinforcement which improves motivation and persistence (Latham & Seijts, 1999).

Set Deadlines
Research shows that one of the best ways for us to achieve success is to set deadlines for when we can accomplish each of our identified subgoals. People commonly underestimate how long it will take them to complete a task, a phenomenon known as the planning fallacy. Being as specific and detailed as possible when creating your sub-goals (and sub-subgoals when necessary) is the best way to achieve your goals within the timeframe you set (Kruger & Evans, 2004). It can sometimes be hard to identify every subcomponent of a task in advance, so don’t get discouraged if a task ends up taking you longer than anticipated. It’s far better to just adjust your deadlines as needed than to scrap the whole plan.

Track Your Progress
Tracking your progress toward your goals and subgoals is an extremely effective strategy for helping you succeed in life (Harkin et al., 2016). There are two major benefits to tracking your progress:

Provides an Accurate Perception of Effort
One benefit of tracking your progress is that it provides a more accurate perception of how much effort you’re actually putting in and consistently you’re sticking to your plan. We often hold inaccurate perceptions of our behaviors. For example, we might think we aren’t working hard enough when in reality we are putting in more than enough time and effort. On the other hand, we might think we are consistently doing the most when we are missing the mark by a substantial amount.

It’s Motivating
Checking off completed subgoals and being able to see the progress we are making can be rewarding and can promote a sense of competence. The positive emotions that come from progress tracking can help promote sustained motivation, which increases our chances of success.

One of the best ways to help your child succeed in life is to instill in them a growth mindset (Dweck, 2006). Psychologist Carol Dweck, the pioneer of growth mindset research, discovered that school-aged children who believed in their ability to grow were more likely to succeed academically than children with a fixed mindset, who believed that their abilities were fixed and couldn’t be developed (Dweck, 2006).

To instill a growth mindset in your child, it is important to convey the following messages to them:

• You value their effort
• Their decisions have an effect on their environment
• Outcomes don’t matter as long as they are enjoying the activity
• Learning should be challenging
• You believe in their capacity to improve
• That they can overcome challenges.

​For example, to demonstrate that you value their effort, you might say “I can see you worked so hard on this!” rather than “You are so smart!”. Or to convey that they have agency over their experience you might say “It seems like it’s time to try a new strategy.” Instead of “Maybe this just isn’t the right activity for you.”

• ​​“Whenever I am in a difficult situation where there seems to be no way out, I think about all the times I have been in such situations and say to myself, “I did it before, so I can do it again.” ― Idowu Koyenikan
• “Success in life is not for those who run fast, but for those who keep running and always on the move.” ― Bangambiki Habyarimana

• “Real, true, key success is honestly liking yourself.” ― Richelle E. Goodrich

• “To quit is to fail – as long as you are still in the game you are succeeding!” ― Lindsey Rietzsch

• “You don’t need to be like anybody else to become somebody great. You need to be 100% yourself and succeed in your own skin.” ― Geoffrey Ocaya

• “Success is not final; failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.” — Winston S. Churchill

• “The first step toward success is taken when you refuse to be a captive of the environment in which you first find yourself.”– Mark Caine

​Want to learn more? Check out these articles:

• ​Success Quotes: For Life, Motivation, Work, & More
• Self-Improvement: 45 Tips, Goals, and Ideas for Self-Growth
• Mindsets: Definition, Examples, and Books (Growth, Fixed + Other Types)​
• ​Passive Income: Ideas, Definition, & Examples​​​​​​​​​​​

• Ajzen, I. (2020). The theory of planned behavior: Frequently asked questions. Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies, 2(4), 314-324.
• Blackwell, S. E. (2019). Mental imagery: From basic research to clinical practice. Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, 29(3), 235.
• Dweck (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Ballantine Books.
• Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P., Prestwich, A., Conner, M., Kellar, I., … & Sheeran, P. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological bulletin, 142(2), 198.
• Kruger, J., & Evans, M. (2004). If you don’t want to be late, enumerate: Unpacking reduces the planning fallacy. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 40(5), 586-598.
• Latham, G. P., & Seijts, G. H. (1999). The effects of proximal and distal goals on performance on a moderately complex task. Journal of Organizational Behavior: The International Journal of Industrial, Occupational and Organizational Psychology and Behavior, 20(4), 421-429.
• Legault, L. (2017). The Need for Competence. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham.
• Murphy, S. E., O’Donoghue, M. C., Drazich, E. H., Blackwell, S. E., Nobre, A. C., & Holmes, E. A. (2015). Imagining a brighter future: the effect of positive imagery training on mood, prospective mental imagery and emotional bias in older adults. Psychiatry Research, 230(1), 36-43
• Pearson, J., Naselaris, T., Holmes, E. A., & Kosslyn, S. M. (2015). Mental imagery: functional mechanisms and clinical applications. Trends in cognitive sciences, 19(10), 590-602.
• Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American psychologist, 55(1), 68.