We all know that success isn’t based upon just a few things, or even a handful… but that success is reliant on many hundreds and thousands of variable critical success factors falling together just right.

However, as hard as it may be, in this post I’ll dive into this subject none-the-less and bring to you what I consider the 9 most critical success factors to me. In this post we’ll discover how factors of success such as attitude and education can come together for successful living and how working smart and being creativity can enhance your chances to.

I’ve gained many small successes during my life and while still young and fighting for my biggest success yet, I believe I’ve learnt and know what it takes. Over the years, it’s these critical success factors, which have lead me to successful living in my life and I’ll share them with you now.

Education

The first of my critical success factors for successful living is education. To be a success, you have to be educated in at least something and for successful living, you need to be educated in many more little things too.

Education is key to success, it defines who you are and guides where you’ll go. So if you lack education, if you lack the knowledge and the will to learn, then growth and success will forever be out of your reach.

Benjamin Franklin once said, “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest,” and I think this just demonstrates the value of education to not only growing your bank account, but growing yourself successfully too.

Skills

Skills are similarly important to the pursuit for successful living as education. Skills are not about having the knowledge, but actually applying it, using it and doing it. Actually building, speaking, and developing things; including yourself.

The use of skills, especially skills of the mind are incredibly important to any person and are a critical success factor in life.

If you have the skills to talk, to build, to write, to organize, to persuade and to get things done, then you can always work on many of the other critical success factors you may lack.

Working Hard

My third, yet probably joint first critical success factor is work. However you look on life, regard success or consider the struggle to gain it, there is no doubt of the work required to get it.

Anybody who has ever succeeded has had to work incredibly hard; it’s just a fact of success. Colin Powell once said, “A dream doesn’t become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination and hard work.”

Financial Backing

Now this is the dullest of the 9, but none-the-less as important. For any person to succeed, they must have money or financial backing at some point in their lives.

Whether it be through support from parents in their teens, a loan from the government for university or an investment from an Angel (that’s an angel investor by the way, not something sent from the skies!) when starting a business, we all need money to succeed.

With financial backing, we gain the freedom to experiment, build and in fact, live full stop. Without any backing and any chance to take the leap, success in life and business very rarely ever gets off the ground.

Working Smart

We can not only work hard for success, but we must work smart to. This includes, time management, project management, people management, the lot. To be a successful worker, you have to work and work smart, be efficient and get the most out of everything you or have others do.

I’m commonly told, “Enough is never enough for you is it, you always want more.” and although I honestly believe this traits runs through my blood, I also know it’s one of the characteristics of my working life that has and will get me to success.

I always push for more and I usually get it, out of every project, task, opportunity or bit of help. It’s just one example of how I get further through working smart.

Attitude

Positive, negative, good or bad… you’re attitude can be critical to your success today, tomorrow and forever. Is your glass half full or half empty? If it’s empty then you need to turn it around, because a negative attitude can do nothing but quash your dreams of success.

With negativity comes the closure of relationships and the inability to see things you would otherwise have seen. You lose your vision, miss on opportunities, and not to mention, enter a vicious circle of negativity ending only further away from success than ever before.

However, a positive and forward looking attitude can do just as much good as a negative one can do bad. With a positive attitude, you make friends, are happy and spot all of the marvellous opportunities out there for you to take on and succeed.

Vision

Vision, something often easily affected by my last critical success factor of attitude, is critical to success. To succeed with something, you need a vision of what that is.

Whether it be a business, a product, a song, or even just your life. You need a vision for where you’re going with it, how it will work and how you can make it succeed.

If you don’t have a long term vision for your life or what you’re working on, then I suggest you take some time out, go away, run, listen to music, whatever… but take time away from work and work on your vision instead.

Only with a clear vision for the future can you work efficiently towards your goals for successful living.

Creativity, Innovation & Ignorance for the Status Quo

Creativity and ignorance for the status quo is something many people often lose as they grow up, but for me, it’s something I strive to keep, because it’s something that I know is such a critical factor of success.

Innovation is key to success, because if nothing ever changes, if the world, its people and its doings never change, then how can we ever move forward as individuals or even succeed as a species as a whole?

“Picasso once said this,” said Sir Ken Robinson at his Ted Talk just a few years ago, “he said that “All children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.” I believe this passionately that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it.” It should be our aim, not too!

Character & Mindset

The final and most critical success factor of them all is character and mindset. You must have the right characters and mindset to ever achieve success.

Now this is as complex as the many factors of success themselves and there is no set character or mindset I can list out guaranteed to bring your success, as everyone’s idea of success is not the same.

However, common characteristics of successful people include being determined, a believer, hard working, a visionary, positive and having their head in the clouds, but there feet still on the ground.

Conclusion

So I think in conclusion, we can all agree on the wide variety and importance of critical success factors. Not every factor is listed above, in fact, nowhere near… but I believe I have listed and discussed some of the most common, critical and influential of the lot to your success and the ones which I believe have by far been the most important for my successes so far too.

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