The Secret of Success

Is hard work truly the only road to success? Discover the real secret of progress and success in your life.

When I was a child, I was chosen to recite at school a poem called "The Secret of Success", by Arturo Cuyas. The main part -translated here to English- goes like this:

"Whatever the work you rehearse, if by chance your first attempt fails, do not be disheartened or dismayed, before starting again with new strength. There will be no difficulty or resistance that you cannot master with talent, determination and patience. "Life is very short, art is long"; Perfection is achieved, however, by work force and experience."

This is a beautiful motivational poem against the perils of discouragement. But the real importance of this piece is that it condenses the road we are taught to follow from our early years in order to achieve success in life: work and persistence. Work until you master something. Work until you get the results you expect.

Pursuant to this rule, we begin by studying hard at school in order to get good grades and learn what will serve us later. We then start to work in order to become independent, and the higher we want to get, or the more money we want, the more work we put into it. People’s journeys are accordingly organized to give the maximum priority to work. Working becomes synonymous with dignity, responsibility and even success itself. Working becomes the centerpiece of people’s lives.

Sooner or later, people end up identifying the road to progress and success with the amount of things they “do” or have to do in order to achieve the results they want. “The more you do it the more you get it” seems to be the motto. And when they get the results or some results, they want more, so they resort to “doing” more and more of the same kind of work. After all, that is the only “proven, tested way” they know to get there.

This is indeed the way to live life and achieve success by the power of reason and persistent action. “Doing” things until the results show up. “Doing”, by the way, is the preferred action of your left brain hemisphere, your rational mind and powerful analytic tool that gives you clarity and focus, but that somehow needs to “do things” to be happy.

However, few people realize that the amount of things they do in order to make progress or achieve success, matters only if those actions help them to shift their vibrational state along the way to one that resonates with progress and success.

No matter how much you “do” some kind of work, if you do not shift your vibration along the way, you will not achieve your result. That is why some people might spend a big amount of time doing something without achieving a specific result, while others might spend the same big amount of time doing the same thing and achieve the result, yet some other people might do the very same thing for less time and nevertheless achieve the same positive result.

It is not the amount of hours you put into something that guarantees the result. It is the shift in your vibration that does.

Granted, knowledge and experience may play a part in this. When you start doing something for the first time, it might take you a considerable amount of time to “get there”. But when you accumulate some knowledge and experience, the length of time it takes you to get the expected result is considerable less. It is easier for you to shift your vibration to one where you feel the result as yours, because you have done it before and therefore are more confident and less doubtful about it.

But the real value of knowledge and experience is that they make it easier for you to shift your vibration. The true real source of success is the attained shift of your vibration itself. This explains why some people with less knowledge or experience are occasionally more successful than those who have more knowledge or experience. This is so because they manage to shift their vibration to one that resonates with progress and success.

You can choose to “work hard” or “work for a long time” on something as the avenue to eventually shift your vibration along the process, and then gain the success that you seek. People usually pursue this avenue.

But if you understand that success does not really come from the length or hardship of the “doing” procedure itself but from getting to the point where your vibration changes so that you truly “feel it”, you might wish to explore a different, alternative or complementary avenue to achieve the results you expect.

In order to pursue this avenue, you have to open up yourself to approaching life not only from reason and action alone, but also from the power of your right brain. Your right brain communicates with you through your feelings and is the one that opens the door to your natural intuition.

The process to create success using your left brain as the starting point goes like this: you analyze the situation gathering as much information as you can about it. You ponder statistics, news, history, traditions, other people’s examples and other people’s opinions or directions about it. Then you decide and take the most “logical” or “reasonable” path under the circumstances and appearances and assign to it lots of action as you deem appropriate and necessary to achieve your results and success. If it does not happen, you react by assigning more and more action to the process, in the hope that success eventually happens.

By contrast, the process to create success using your right brain as the starting point goes like this: you pay attention to your feelings and open up to your intuition before taking any action. You search for the essence of the matter and ponder how you relate to it and what you really want to experience. When you identify what success means for you in its essence, you find the general sensation that gives you enthusiasm about it. Then you nurture that sensation in your mind by vividly imagining the pleasant details of what you want to experience. You work with your feelings until you achieve the vibrational state that resonates with the results you want to achieve. Then you will feel inspired to take the appropriate actions to achieve your results and success. The process will feel more natural to you. You can make adjustments along the way, but your main “work” is done on your vibrational state. If it is pure and does not infringe upon other people’s rights, results will follow.

The left brain process for success is an outside-in process. It is the process of the hard worker. The right brain process for success is an inside-out process. It is the process of the artist. Artists imagine first in their minds what they want to create and then take the natural actions to give form to it. They “see it”, “hear it” and vividly “experience it” first in their minds and then proceed to create it, guided by this inspirational, vibrational force.

This is the way life works and flows. This is the real secret of success. So be the artist of your own life.