Successful People Don’t Wear Someone Else’s Shoes

business man on beach walking away from his shoes

What’s wrong with success checklists?

How many lists of  ‘how successful people ______’ (fill in the blank) have you read? If you search the internet for “how successful people” in 2015 you would have found 409,000 results and today, in 2019, you will find “About 1,100,000,000 results (0.43 seconds)” . Fill in the blanks with anything from brushing their teeth to where they part their hair and what kind of shoes they wear.

If you think about it, these lists set the rest of the success seeking world up for failure, negative self-talk and low self-esteem. It also sets such high expectations for the ‘successful’ to live up to.

To find successful people that are a mashup of all of these lists  would be as easy to find as the Loch Ness Monster.

If you’re already successful, what do you think when you read these lists? Sure, some of your do’s and don’ts may match, some you may be working on, but do you feel you could put a checkmark next to all  those ‘what successful people do and don’t do‘?

What list you need to subscribe to?

Successful people are human.  We each have our own quirks and flaws. We are not perfect, we are messy in our own way. What we all have in common is this; we became successful because of and in spite of the roles we played in navigating our journey.

Those who continue to stay successful have more times than not, adjusted their behaviors, habits, and roles along the way.

We can both teach and learn from others, take tips, model certain procedures and behaviors, follow a map, however, the map is not the territory or the climate.

We need to realize, we are all a bit different, we all wear different shoes on our path to success. You can imagine being in someone else’s shoes, however,  we all need to navigate through the ups and downs in your own.

The most important checklist is:

  1. Know how to choose the best fit for you
  2. Know which you need to conquer the territory of the day or moment
  3. Know when the time is right to get a different size
  4. Admit if they start to stink and replace them
  5. Never borrow someone else’s shoes, you don’t know where they’ve been