Written by Maruf Lawal
For Steemit.com
I have been taking time to think very recently about how successful people come to be successful.
I have come across many things being thrown around by people, like mind-shift, hardwork, open-mindedness, pushing the boundaries and taking risks etc.
While not discarding any of the above, none has really left an impression on me like the word “Reflection”, reflection as defined by the Oxford dictionary is "serious thought or consideration”, but actually, I see reflection and its usefulness in life progress to be much more encompassing than stated above.
Reflection is the ability to look back after the fact/after the event on the positive and the negative of what has just happened and critically analyze the situation until the real cause of success or failure is understood (Happy is the man who knows the causes of things). This shouldn’t be mistaken with reflection before action, which focuses on using past knowledge/learning of past events to drive future activities.
Many a times when ordinary people are successful at doing some things, they take the success for granted, they are not in the business of success improvement or automation of success, reflection requires that you understand why you succeeded in the first place, and the value of critical reflection would result in questions similar to the following ” how do i perpetuate my success in the area?, how do i improve my ability to be successful over and over again in this area?, and how do ensure the success is devoid of luck and emotion?, what are those factors i need to look out for in other to remain successful in this area? etc the list goes on. This is what successful people do, they reflect, and they proceed to systemize and automate the outcome of the reflection in other to ensure that they perpetuate success while improving the decision making processes to ensure that.
On the flip side of of things, when ordinary people fail to achieve the desired results from an activity, large percentage of us give up and say this thing its just beyond our limit, some will try again but lower the expectation, and many never try again and they just give up.
Successful people on the other hand knows the magic in reflection, they understand that knowing how to deal with your setback is as important as knowing how to move forward, they understand the fundamental law of nature that, in order to gain strength one has to push one’s limit through the pain barrier, (Pain + Reflection =Progress).
They painstakingly go through the activity step by step in other to understand the reason for failure, they deal with failure the same way they deal with success, they understand why it happened, they deconstruct the processes, they seek help from more knowledgeable people and they stay on it until they have identified the reason for failure. They then proceed to reconstruct the entire process again, and try it all over again, while accepting what is true which might sometime be different from what they want to be true.
Above is what i have come to understand, that to be truly successful and make progress in life, you must learn to reflect on both your success and failures with sole aim of improving the entire process.
