7 Proven Principles for Sustained Success

Success is a deeply personal journey, defined by some as financial freedom and by others as a fulfilling family life. In the UK, recent data shows that 65% of people prioritize personal happiness and quality of life as their ultimate goal. However, regardless of your definition, achieving and maintaining that success requires a foundation of core values. This article explores seven tested and proven principles that serve as a roadmap for anyone looking to bridge the gap between their current reality and their highest vision.

In fact, in the UK, 65% of people define success as personal happiness and quality of life. Quality of life directly translates to financial stability, as that is the single most important marker for quality of life.

Here are seven key principles that have been tested and proven for living a successful life, especially if success for you is financial freedom.

1. Take Responsibility

This is key. You need to start taking responsibility from when you’re a teenager. When things go wrong, don’t be too quick to blame others. Look for what YOU did wrong, this helps put things in perspective. Yes, others played a part too, but your own role is equally important, and most times, more important.

Professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist William Raspberry had this to say about being responsible.

“If you want to be thought of as a solid, reliable pillar of your community when you’re fifty, you can’t be an irresponsible, corner-cutting exploiter at twenty-five. . . . The time to worry about your reputation is before you have one. You determine your reputation by deciding who and what you are and by keeping that lofty vision of yourself in mind, even when you’re having a rip-roaring good time”

2. Define Your Vision and Goals

You’ve heard this one before, but for good reason. If you need to write it down, do that. You need to have an idea, at every point in time, what you’re working towards. What do you want to achieve? The answer to this question will shape many of the decisions you make.

In fact, Dr. Gail Matthews of the Dominican University, in her study of goal achievers, says you’re 42% more likely to achieve your goals if you write them down. Data shows that those who define their vision and goals are 10 times more likely to achieve them.

3. Always be Ready to Learn

Being ready to learn is what will make you grounded in a fast changing world. Perhaps most importantly, it keeps you employable. The most successful people in the workplace are those who can learn where others are complaining about change.

This attitude will take you farther than your skillset ever will. This is because you’d always find yourself in unfamiliar territory. You have two options. The first is to give up and conclude that this is not your area, the second is to learn and adapt. Life is filled with learning, and if you stop learning you stop growing, if you stop growing…you know what that means.

4. Build Resilience

Life can be tough. It can get really ugly, and if you don’t expect life to get that way, it can become unbearable. Always remember that tough times WILL come, and you have to be ready for it. They don’t last forever, but resilience will help you manage frustrations for when they inevitably come.

5. Develop People Skills

You need this skill so you can build strong, lasting relationships in your personal and professional life. People are the most important resource. This is why Human Resources Professionals are worth their weight in gold. The relationships you build will take you far, and they’d take you into spaces you won’t otherwise have been in.

UK data collected by the University of Sunderland indicates that over 92% of employers consider people skills to be more important, or as important, as technical knowledge. Another study identifies people skills as the single most important factor for career success, saying it accounts for 85% of it, while technical knowledge is responsible for the other 15%.

This explains why when you look closely at leaders of Fortune 500 companies, what stands out about them is not how technically gifted they are, it’s how well they are at managing people.

6. Pay Attention to Your Health

Yes, it’s important to work, but you should also pay equal attention to your health – physical and mental. Those two are closely linked. Some people don’t think about their mental health until they’re already spiraling. Pay attention to it so it doesn’t get to that point.

Preventive health care is particularly important in the UK because of how strained the healthcare system is. Getting the needed healthcare can take time, and your booked appointment may not come quickly enough.

7. Act with Integrity

This is especially important if you’re in business. You may have heard that anything you do to make money is worth it. That is not true, because if you trade your integrity for profit, you may be giving up your chance to ever make any more profit. Integrity is THE currency in business. If you’re still building your business, integrity is even more important. You need it to get into the big leagues

Integrity helps individuals and companies build lasting organizational structures. Perhaps most importantly, it builds leaders. Companies that hold management personnel to high ethical standards often breed ethical leaders. This means making sure that integrity is rewarded, and the lack of it is met with the appropriate action.

Conclusion

These principles apply to life generally, and you’d need to follow them regardless of what success you’re chasing. There’s no aspect of your life that one or more of these principles don’t apply.

Some of the above-mentioned cannot be mastered in days or weeks. This means you’d need to apply them over years, before you can master them. Discipline is important to apply these principles. Self-control is also needed.

At Inside Success, we provide young leaders with the tools they need to become their best selves.