There is a recognizable pattern of qualities for success. The vast majority of successful people did not get there by accident. They took purposeful steps in order to get to where they are. The good news is that taking purposeful steps will work for a majority of the people.
I started the 2022 year with a net worth of $440,000. That puts me in the top 1-2% net worth bracket for my age group. I would consider myself as successful. Does that mean that there aren’t people who achieved more success at a younger age than me? No. However, that doesn’t mean that what I accomplished is nothing.
I didn’t get there by accident. There were so many sacrifices I had to make throughout my journey that I’m still making today. Yes, I’m making less sacrifices but I still don’t have the next generation level wealth in order to not sacrifice anything. As long as you are putting in the work every day, things have a way of falling into place.
Throughout the journey, it will feel like it’s not making sense and you’ll question everything. Why you even decided to put in so much work and sacrifice so much for little returns. I’ve been there. It happened in my 3rd to 4th year of the FIRE journey. It was frustrating, to say the least.
However, once you decide to give it one extra year is when it’ll make the biggest difference. The qualities of success below aren’t crafted out of thin air. It’s what helped me get to where I am today. There’s no need to implement all of the qualities at once or even in a single year.
You have your whole life ahead of you and you can get there slowly but surely.
9 Qualities of Success
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So with that said, let’s get into the 9 qualities of success.
1) Persistence is the Most Required Qualities of Success
The one who wins is just the one who outlasts others. Even when the FIRE progression was particularly hard for me, I still kept going and never gave up. It was when COVID happened and my net worth got decimated in a matter of a month. From $235k to about $145k. It was nuts and demoralizing.
I knew I was going to have to face a bear market but this quickly?! It was a shaky period with unlimited amounts of uncertainty. The biggest quality of success is your ability and refusal to quit if the course you’re on is a winning course. Buy and hold is a tried and true method of success and so I still kept on going even when it was difficult.
When you bet and continue to do something that’s been proven to work and don’t give up on it, then that’ll make the biggest difference in the world. That’s why this is the number one in order of importance. Marriages don’t last forever because the partners were amazing in short bursts of time. They last forever because neither gave up.
2) Desire to Improve
If you don’t want success in the first place, you’re not going to get there. You have to want to improve yourself if you’re going to actually improve yourself. For me, I had a dying desire to improve and get there. My parents sacrificed everything to come to this great country and there was no way I wanted to let them down.
So if I made even the slightest mistake, I wanted to improve upon it. It almost became an obsession and an OCD trait of mine and I’m thankful my younger self put in the work to get there. Qualities of success requires the desire to get to a higher level than where you already are right now. That’s how you elevate up.
No matter what you want to improve at, financial situation, career, family, relationships, friendships, and the like, you need to want to improve upon it. The first desire has to start with you. Without the proper motivation, the more likely result is that you are going to sit around the house, hoping success will come to you.
3) Work Ethic is a Necessary Quality for Success
Now that you want to be successful, you have to put in the work. A former MD told me, “I don’t know anyone who’s successful that only works 40 hours per week”. Work ethic is one of the most common qualities for success. You won’t see a successful person who got things handed to them. They made things happen.
You have to put in the hours in the beginning. After some time passes, you’ll realize how to be more efficient with your time that you put in. So you’ll need to put in less hours as time passes. However, that doesn’t excuse you from putting in the hours to work towards your hopes and dreams in the first place.
Competition is fiercer than ever. There are people who are working twice as hard as you willing to get half the benefits. Does that mean that you should try to break your back? Absolutely not, I metaphorically broke my back and wouldn’t wish it on anyone. However, it does mean you need to put in effort.
4) Ability to Pivot
Not everything you do is going to be successful the first time around. You’re going to have to pivot if you know, deep down, that something’s not working. Many people pivoted and changed their path from their original path. There’s nothing wrong with changing courses.
However, there is something wrong with not listening when results are speaking to you. There are times even when the results aren’t showing, you know that you can get there. That’s not the time to pivot. That’s the time to be persistent. However, you know deep inside whether something is genuinely a failure and a success.
You’re the closest one to the actual events and therefore, you know when something is destined and doomed to fail. That’s when you need to make the disciplined lay down and admit defeat. There’s nothing wrong with admitting defeat and focusing your efforts that’ll bring you more success.
Qualities of success includes being able to admit defeat and pivot.
5) Communication is an Underrated Quality for Success
Sadly, when you start out, you’re going to depend on others to give you a chance. No one will give you a chance if you haven’t communicated any information to the opposing party. You need to communicate some piece of information, whether it’s for a job, raising money, to be a business partner, and the like.
Communication is one of the most overlooked qualities of success. The one who can communicate ideas and win support has a leg up versus the genius who just knows everything. Opportunities for the genius are limited, while the master communicator has a better chance at garnering support.
At the very beginning, you WILL be dependent on someone else to give you a chance. We have to ride the coattails of someone else’s success when we start out, for the most part, in securing a job and paying the bills. The one who can communicate and sell themselves and their ideas will have a leg up in the start.
6) Constantly Learning New Skills
There’s no way that you know everything when you’re starting out. There’s going to be tricks that you’re going to miss in anything that you want to do. Therefore, qualities of success includes constantly learning new skills. We learn something new every single day. It just depends whether the new things we learn is worthwhile or not.
For me, I am thankful for learning stock market investing skills. That’s been the most helpful tip in my entire financial journey, by far. It’s not increasing income, it’s not how to negotiate, it’s learning how to invest. Compound interest is one of the biggest wonders of the world.
Constantly learning something new is the difference. The new skills are not going to make a difference in your life tomorrow. We learn new skills to make a difference to our lives at some point when it’s the most useful for us. It will come handy at some point in your life, but you just don’t control the timing of when it’s useful.
7) Knowing When to Take Feedback and When to Ignore Others
Sometimes, others have our best interest at heart. Most of the times, others have their best interest at heart. One of the most out of the box qualities for success is to recognize the difference. Anytime you do anything interesting and make others feel something is when we’re prone to the most backlash or praise.
Learn to ignore others when it’s necessary and know when to take feedback and take it to heart. Remember that at the end of the day, it’s your life. You have to live with your own choices instead of living other people’s opinions on what they think you have to do. You have the power of choice.
Whether you succeed or fail, it’s going to be dependent on what you decided to do. Therefore, know when it’s the right time to take feedback and know when it’s the wrong time. There’s going to be many times when others insist their advice is right only to be proven wrong later. You don’t want that happen.
8) Fear
Successful people are some of the most afraid people you’ve met. They are so afraid of running out of money, becoming a nobody, and the like that they have a dying need to put in additional work than the next person. Fear is one of the greatest qualities of success. It’s what gets you up in the morning.
Where if you don’t wake up and produce value, then you don’t have food on the table. It’s that fear factor that is helpful and motivational for you to keep going. I was genuinely afraid of ending up as a nobody when I was in college. That’s why I put in 100+ applications for internships and for jobs every year.
I stayed in the library until 12am or so without any hesitation. I didn’t mind doing any of that and the sacrifices that I’ve made. It may have been paranoia on my part. However, I am perfectly OK with that because I put in the work to be successful. Fear is a great motivator for you to get after it.
9) Patience is a MUST Quality for Success
And lastly, patience. I saved patience for last. Delayed gratification can’t be overlooked. The famous marshmallow test is famous for a reason. It works. Now, obviously, don’t wait for things so far into the future that it no longer matters. You don’t want to wait so long that your entire life passes you by.
Qualities for success requires patience as a necessary component. When I started my millionaire journey, many coworkers made fun of me for saving so much money. Many friends made fun of me, at that. However, I knew that I was just different from them. I wanted to save now to enjoy my life later, and that’s what I did.
Can you put in the work day in and day out and genuinely be OK with little to new results in the beginning? Are you going to lose hope or are you going to be patient and wait out a year or two before the results start to trickle in then snowball in years three and beyond? Patience is an important life skill for success.
Take the Qualities of Success to Heart
The qualities of success isn’t something that I just thought of in thin air. It’s what helped me get to where I am today. I may lose my accomplishments as time passes and I age. However, if I continue down the path and employing these strategies, I highly doubt I will lose the status.
If you want more success in your life, it’s time to actually put in the effort to get there. These takeaway qualities are what I learned after reading so many other people’s stories as well. My favorite book, How To Win at the Sport of Business, takes a lot of the qualities into account, such as having a good work ethic.
Some days will be too slow and you will not have the energy to go on. I have days like this quite often, even after many years of getting used to employing these strategies. However, over the long term is what matters. If you’re using these qualities of success over the long term in a given year, you’re on the right track.
Make sure to keep track of your progress so that you don’t just have a general sense of moving forward. But you actually have a specific sense that you’re moving forward. I write down the most important goals I want to achieve in a sticky note on my MacBook. Every so often months, I look back at it.
You don’t want to go through life without knowing which direction you’re going to. If you want to take one or two qualities of success to heart to begin with, by all means. It doesn’t have to be everything right off the bat. Whichever one you do decide though, give it a fair amount of effort before giving up.
Persist your way to success.
9 Qualities of Success Shortlist
- Persistence
- Desire to improve
- Work ethic
- Ability to pivot
- Communication
- Constantly learning new skills
- Knowing when to take feedback and when to ignore others
- Fear
- Patience
