Succeeding By Chance or By Design?

The kind of success most people expect and experience in their endeavours is oftentimes nothing more than incidental success. It is the kind of success obtained by chance, casually and not necessarily requiring strategic actions to make happen.

The problem with incidental success is that it has very low probability of accomplishment - it may or may not be achieved. Not only that, the quality of results obtained is often average, less than satisfactory and unsustainable.

When you formulate aspirations with no action plans, entertain hope with no strategy or keep dreaming without doing, you are invariably setting up yourself for incidental success. By relying on winning a lottery or acquiring an inheritance as a strategy for becoming rich; by hoping for luck, waiting for things to improve or hoping for manna to drop from the sky, you are programming yourself for incidental success.

On the other hand, when you set definite goals, back them up with credible action plans and are committed to their pursuit, you will set up yourself to succeed by design.

Succeeding by design is a lot like the United States landing the first man on the moon in 1969 - it didn’t happen by accident. It happened because the country made it a goal to be accomplished. Eight years before, the then US President, John F. Kennedy had made a mission statement to the American Congress saying, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”

Of course, your personal goals may not be as audacious as going to the moon, nonetheless, they must be high enough to inspire you to live like the star you were born to be. As Clement W. Stone succinctly put it, “Aim for the moon, even if you miss it, you will land among the stars.”