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What does it take to be successful?  Is it relationships with people / your network?  Is it a healthy work / personal life?  Is it money, reputation, ass kissing, good looks, ability, skills, or intelligence?  While it can be argued that all of these alone or together contribute to becoming successful, in my mind the most important is courage.  Courage to believe in yourself, courage to take risks, courage to fight, courage to admit you’re wrong, courage to fail, and courage to be successful.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.    – Steve Jobs

1. Courage to believe in yourself – People often confuse self confidence with arrogance.  To be sure it’s a fine line – but self confidence is knowing yourself (your strengths and your weaknesses) and understanding limits and how you may meet or exceed them realistically.  Arrogance is the view that you are somehow better than someone else or more superior.  The former is about internal understanding while the latter is about external perceptions and how you compare your self worth against others.  Poor self confidence often breeds arrogance because if you’re not sure of yourself you need validation of your self worth by comparing yourselves to others, or even by bringing others down thereby elevating yourself.  The courage to believe in yourself is accepting yourself, and that it is OK to acknowledge both your strengths and weaknesses.
2. Courage to take risks – There is no better role model for this than the late Steve Jobs whom i very much admire.  In a world dominated by the pursuit of money and power, it takes someone very courageous to challenge that, and to challenge other preconceptions of society and the public.  Without risk and risk takers, innovation and creativity are replaced with the status quo…nothing is advanced nothing is gained if we do not challenge what is considered “normal” or “safe”.
3. Courage to fight – It is easy to be a yes man.  To “go with the flow”, to “follow the herd”.  Because if we always follow the majority than we have an easy excuse for when things don’t work out or when we’re wrong.  It takes courage to fight for your own beliefs and to fight against an opinion or idea that you feel is inaccurate, wrong, or just a bad idea.  It takes courage to look someone in the eye and disagree with them, especially if that someone is your boss or a client.
4. Courage to admit you’re wrong – For a lot of people and for a lot of smart, intelligent, and successful people, admitting you’re wrong is often a tough task.  For people in roles of leadership or authority it can be seen as a sign of weakness – as if they are infallible.  But everyone makes mistakes and we’re all human.  Being able to admit your mistakes, admit that you’re wrong not only shows great moral character but it shows true leadership.  Leadership is about finding and implementing the best solution, the best way.  We can only truly learn when we make mistakes.
5. Courage to fail – Courage to fail sounds a lot like taking risks and it is, but it’s also a bit more specific.  Having the courage to fail is understanding what it means to fail, and to gain new insight into why we fail and help us to either fail again or succeed.  Some say that success is simply a lot of little failures.  It’s also a mentality change.  In our society we are usually taught that to fail is the worst possible thing to happen.  An “F” means to “Fail” and it means that we’re trash.  We have not fulfilled or done what we were expected to do, in the way we were expected to do it.  To have courage to fail is to think of failure as a positive not a negative thing and to reinforce that not just with ourselves but with people we manage and work together with.
6. Courage to be successful – This seems like an odd one.  It seems we all want to be successful.  But success is not such a one dimensional thing. Courage to be successful means to be satisfied with your success and to enjoy it.  For some people reaching a certain level or being compared with another successful person is daunting and intimidating.  They think that it’s better to be satisfied with an above average yet attainable achievement status.  For them success is unreachable, and even when reached, barely recognizable.  There will always be someone better, smarter, richer, more powerful, more successful than you.  However, that shouldn’t stop you from reaching your own unique and attainable level of success.  Rather than comparing yourself to others, have the courage to reach your own success in your own way, on your own time.