Seeing successful people around us, most of us often think that these people are successful because they were born into different conditions, with much favorable financial conditions, blessed with better educational facilities, and a much better growing environment than ourselves.

Little do we realize that all successful people have necessarily gone through the essential process and pain of failures before they succeeded in their endeavors. There is no success without failure. All the successful people have risen from their failures and reached out to the path to success. The path to success is never smooth. If it was, then everyone would be successful but that is not so. At the same time to believe that your conditions, your environment helps you to succeed in life is an absolute myth.

We all know in life what is good for us but we don’t do anything about it. Big talk and no action will not make us successful. I believe this is what makes achieving success difficult. Lack of action, lack of determined effort, lack of initiative to go after and pursue our goals holds us back to achieve what we are meant to achieve. Our will power is too weak to do the things we need to do to succeed in life and then we start blaming our conditions. We start finding excuses. Oh, I wish had the money to do it. Oh, I wish I had the time to do it. Oh, at the moment I am stuck with doing something else, I will reprioritize my life goals soon. The ‘soon’ never comes.

We talk about time flying so fast. Just a few days ago 2016 started and now we are at the end of it. Growth is not just about passing years and aging. It is not about adding years to your life but to add life to these years. Our constant endeavor each day should be to be better today than what we were yesterday. If you see examples of successful people such as Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Ralph Lauren, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Oprah Winfrey, J.K. Rowling and many other famous and not so famous but successful people, you will see that almost all of them come from very difficult conditions and the environment that they were exposed to was not the best conducive environment to result in their success. Perhaps their conditions were even more difficult than what you and I would have been through.

The point is that these adverse conditions did not deter them. They were constantly focused on achieving their larger goals and to do something remarkable in life. Always remember, small daily improvements can bring remarkable changes in your life and takes you closer each day towards your goals. As they say, “The secret of your success lies in your daily agenda.” You will always find the time and money to do something that you really want to do. If not, you will always have excuses.

So stop living in the false impression that super achievers are extra-ordinary people. Almost all of them have been the most ordinary people who were determined to progress to the heights that they had set for themselves.

Let 2017 be the best ever year yet in your life. Let in future this be the year that you remember when you look back and feel proud of the small daily improvements that you started making towards the achievement of your life goals.

Happy New Year…your partner in your personal development

– Nalin Chandna