Ingredients for Success: Be Humble. Seek a Great Team, Skill Sets and Mentors

Where does the journey to success begin?

Once you have a vision to follow, the next step is planning, training, learning. This process does not end when the next step of the journey begins, but it sets a solid foundation for all that is to come.

When you strive to do a thing well, seek out the best mentors. There is no point to starting from scratch when others before you have tried and learned from their experience. You too should benefit from their work. To ignore the work that others have done before you is prideful and counterproductive. Seek out those who can teach you. Be humble, and learn from them.

If there is someone you can seek out and approach directly to learn from, this is of course ideal. This allows the opportunity for conversation, for a relationship. And always look for opportunities to learn. Mentors can appear in unlikely places.

When it is time to start pursuing your dream, look honestly at what this requires. Take time to consider this question as fully as you can, and as your journey begins, revisit this question often. The journey to success is constantly evolving and requires never ending revision as you grow and learn and as your process becomes more efficient and refined.

To start, answer these questions: what skills and experience do you bring to this endeavor? What do you still need? And what parts of this process – again, humility and honesty are key – could perhaps be performed better by someone else? Consider this question in two different lights to make sure you have a full answer. First, what tasks are you capable of performing that perhaps someone else demonstrates greater skill for performing? And secondly, what tasks are you attempting to take on that might conflict with your primary responsibilities, whatever these might be? Examine the roles of all team members with these two considerations in mind.

You will want to have a comprehensive and able skill set assembled before you start. This means assembling a solid team. A team that contains all the elements of skill, knowledge and awareness is what you will need in order to succeed in your endeavor. A team that works well together and is greater as a whole than it is in its individual parts.

With honesty, humility, an open mind and a good team, you have the most solid foundation for success.