Want to find out how successful people become successful? Actually, they share common qualities that have allowed them to do well in their particular field.
While the major ingredient for success is following your passion so you can enjoy what you do, there are many other factors that you can work on to emulate the successful.
TED Talks are easy to listen to and feature speakers who are entertaining, experienced in a particular field, and inspiring.
Listen to these 9 empowering TED Talks, take notes, and then start working on these things in your life. Soon, you too, might find yourself listed among the world’s most successful entrepreneurs.
1.You’ll zoom towards success if you know who you are and what you’re passionate about.
Entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk tells how passion led him to starting a new company at the age of 30.
To be successful, he suggests you first need to decide who you are and what your passion is. What do you really want to do with your life? Caring about what you do and doing what you care about are essential for success.
2. You’ll zoom towards success if you know what will motivate you.
Career analyst, Dan Pink, discusses what motivates people and how necessary it is to understand just what motivates you, if you’re seeking success.
He argues that a new type of motivation – not monetary – is needed. to solve problems in a right-brain, creative way.
Are you intrinsically motivated? Self-motivation is crucial to solving problems in an innovative way. According to Pink, knowing what motivates you is essential for success.
3. You’ll zoom towards success if you make stress your friend.
Health psychologist, Kelly McGonigal, tells about a study that changed how she viewed stress.
Do you believe that stress is bad for your health? McConigal discovered that by changing how you feel about stress, you can change your body’s response in a positive way. When you think positively about stress, you make your stress response healthier.
Find out why the way you think about stress matters, particularly when you convince yourself that “This is my body helping me rise to this challenge.”
4. You’ll zoom towards success if you possess true grit.
Psychologist Angela Duckworth, a seventh grade teacher, learned from student work and observation that IQ was not the only factor separating her most and least academically gifted students.
What she found as the most important element for success was unexpected. Grit was the surprise element. She discusses why grit is so important and why it is an essential ingredient to build up in yourself if you want to be successful.
5. You’ll zoom towards success if you understand that when you’re happy you work better.
Positive psychologist, Shawn Achor, discusses his view of happiness as it relates to work results. Instead of seeing happiness as something we receive when we reach a goal, he aims to encourage us to start out with happiness.
Do you believe you should work hard to be successful so that you can be happier? Or does positivity in the present produce happiness which then inspires you to become more productive?
Achor suggests techniques that help us rewire the brain so we can change our understanding of being happy. “When we’re happy and positive, our brains work more optimistically and more successfully.”
6. You’ll zoom towards success if you expand your creativity.
Writer and radio producer, Julie Burstein, uses her favorite forms of art to show how to be creative.
Burstein shares 4 lessons in creativity. She explains that “experience, challenge and limitations are all things we need to embrace for creativity to flourish.”
She vividly illustrates the life cycle that we all live – the cycle of creation and destruction, of control and letting go, of picking up the pieces and making something new.
According to Burstein, creativity allows you to see things in a new way. It is an essential part of being successful in your own area of expertise.
7. You’ll zoom towards success if you deal with procrastination as it arises.
Vik Nithy was founder of 3 companies by the age of 20. In this video, he explains why people procrastinate and how it becomes a battle between two different parts of our brains.
Vik recommends that to overcome procrastination, we need to plan the process by visualizing it. When you see the task in your mind, the brain is convinced that you’ve done it before. This means that visualization can help you eliminate procrastination.
This talk provides a few effective ideas for you to deal with procrastination, in order to expand your productivity and level of success.
8. You’ll zoom towards success if you make videos that go viral.
YouTube’s Trends Manager, Kevin Allocca, shows various videos and explains exactly why they went viral.
Another string to your success bow could be the creation of your own viral videos. Allocca shares the three key ingredients he has discovered to help you become famous on YouTube.
Watch this video for ways that you can also reach the masses in creative ways, thereby building your success.
9. You’ll zoom towards success if you schedule time off for yourself.
Graphic designer, Stefan Sagmeister talks about the importance of taking time off work for rest and recovery. However, his idea of “time off” is out of the ordinary.
Instead of waiting for retirement so you can relax, he inserts his holidays into his yearly routine, and takes one year off in every seven. While this might not be the type of holiday you’d be planning on taking, his reasons for doing so should motivate you to ar least take “time out” for yourself on a regular basis.
That is his road to success. You might be surprised at the benefits he finds from taking regular “time out”.
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The above TED Talks contain many actionable ideas. I hope you’ve been inspired and motivated to take action on some of them, and move you forward on your success journey.
Featured photo credit: TED talks via ted.com
