A Teenager’s Road To Success
Success doesn’t have to do with smarts, looks, or luck. Success happens when a person becomes the best he can be by making the most of his talents and seizing opportunities when they materialize. This holds true for everyone – including teenagers, who have youth backing them to get a good jump start on the road to success.
So teenagers, here are a few ideas to start on your road to success: Start with a positive attitude. I remember years ago a teacher mentioning that a lot can be accomplished with the right attitude. A positive attitude helps you to really look at difficulties or challenges in a way that you can effectively defeat them. Your attitude determines both the simplest and the most complicated of actions – from the way you carry yourself to the way you deal with hard times.
A new way of looking at situations will also help a teenager make wiser choices at home, school, and with friends. Looking at something from a different angle, and using the slightest of positive actions will help you change the course of the situation. Remember the trickle effect: the slightest positive action begets another positive action… and the chain continues. Is the outcome going as you had planned? If not, how can you change it by the way you act, think, and perceive things? Success starts with little steps. You might perhaps be “just” a teenager, but this is your life. You are the one that has to live it. Discover what matters most to you in life. When you have a clear outlook on what is really important, the decisions and choices will follow the same pattern. Define what success means specifically to you. Nobody can tell you what success is; we each have our own ideas of the meaning of success as it pertains to us. Having a clear view of your idea of success will help you organize your thoughts and set appropriate goals. What is important to you? What do you enjoy doing? What things mean the most to you? Answer these questions, and you’ll be on the road to defining success for yourself.
The secret to success is failure. This might be a hard point to understand, but you have to actually fail in order to learn and move forward. Whether or not you want it to happen, you are going to fail at one time or another. Everyone does. So get it out of your head that failure is bad. Without failure, you’d never have mistakes to learn from, you’ll never grow as a person, and, in fact, you might be so afraid of failure that you won’t even try anything. Keep this in mind, kids: Oprah Winfrey was taken off the air when she worked as a television anchorwoman in Baltimore because they felt she didn’t have a presence. Thomas Edison tried out thousands of versions before inventing the electric light bulb. And the first business venture of Microsoft founder Bill Gates – now one of the richest men in the world
– went belly up.
Lori Catozzi is the assistant editor and a feature writer for Monadnock Shopper News