In this Explearning conversation, we discuss important strategies for increase your chance of success in everything you do. 

Renegade Outlier

Defying the status quo. Gets you thinking about whether you really need to pay your dues. People who concern themselves with paying dues are fearful of breaking rules and afraid of failure.

Think about it in terms of “lateral thinking” which is a concept from Shane Snow. It helps up look at problem-solving differently. 

It broadens our horizons and helps us seek inspiration from different directions. 

It feeds nicely into the idea of the renegade. The renegade asks why these rules exist in the first place and question the status quo. Experiment with doing things differently. This will unlock different ways of doing things, which could perhaps even be more effective. 

Showing different perspectives and richness of diverse experiences is more powerful than paying your dues. We can be much more multidimensional than just going down one track and developing a single skill.

You can bring a great deal of experience from different fields and industries and apply it to other areas. It’s about connecting the dots and doing lateral thinking.

You don’t need the cookie-cutter track record or pay your dues in order to be qualified for a certain job.

You can find creative ways to “qualify” for a job by diversifying your experiences and expanding on your professional skillsets.

Find a Mentor

This is a mentor you’ve sought out and care about. It’s not a mentor that was assigned to you at work.

Mentors you choose are crucial to understanding yourself and what you want to do in life.

Mentors don’t always need to be people you know personally. They can be people whose podcasts you listen to, blogs they write, companies they run. You can do a character study on these people and become a mentor for you without them even knowing they’re a mentor to you. By paying attention to how they speak, what podcasts they listen to, what books they recommend, and what decisions they make, you can learn a lot from them and about them.

Learn from Failure

Learning in particular from other people’s failure. When you experience failure, you might not hold yourself accountable for the failure and instead place blame on external factors. It’s easy to blame external factors beyond our control as opposed to taking responsibility for our mistakes. For example, blaming the sun for being in your eyes as the reason you missed the serve. 

Learning from other peoples’ failures helps you see the mistakes more objectively. You can make a more impartial analysis of the situation when you are not involved. You can be more objective and see what went wrong and how they could have done things differently.

From the perspective of assessing failure, biographies are great because they provide a more impartial perspective. The more you can study other people’s failures the more protected you are against making the same mistakes.

Now, if you do want to learn from your own mistakes and treat failure as a teacher, you’ll need what experts call, the Expert Mindset. Because it is harder to separate yourself from the equation and have a more objective perspective on your own mistakes, it requires a particular mindset. The Expert Mindset allows you to dissolve the ego and separate the event and who you are as a person. In other words, failure has nothing to do with your character. It’s about not taking the situation too personally, and about treating the failure as a teachable moment. It challenges you to refine your approach to certain things without making a personal attack on who you are as a person. 

Don’t be afraid of negative feedback. Try to train yourself to seek out and even encourage feedback, both positive and negative.

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Success is a suitcase term. At the end of the day, you need to define what success means to you. The strategies we discussed here today will help you reach your ultimate objectives.

See you in the next conversation!

Happy Explearning ⚡

About the Author and the Explearning Academy:

Mary Daphne is an expert in communication, executive interpersonal skills, and personal development. She is the founder of the Explearning Academy, a platform dedicated to helping individuals enhance their social fluency, boost their careers, and elevate their social game. Through immersive group coaching programs like the Executive Communication Lab and self-guided journeys, participants gain the social superpowers and career catapults they've been searching for. If you're ready to take your negotiation skills to the next level and connect with like-minded individuals, visit academy.explearning.co and explore the various plans available. Join the Explearning Academy community and unlock your full potential.

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