Can we learn the secrets of success from the leaders we admire so much and put such lessons to effective use to seek our own opportunities for success? After all, they go about their work and keep achieving success and are not going to teach us!

The answer is: We can definitely learn from them and achieve success in our endeavors provided we have the right attitude for it.

But let us first look at what Thomas Alva Edison has said: ‘Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.’

For many average Joe’s and Jane’s problem may lie here. They wish to see instant results and are not very eager to do hard work. It may be due to many reasons:

* They may be willing to do hard work but may be puzzled as to do what, how to do and so on.
* They may have seen many hard working people in their own circle of contacts achieving very little success. They may have convinced them that they may have to do much more to achieve success than merely doing hard work.
* They may not be the hard working type of people.

Lessons in leadership or success can be picked up from any source – from school or college curriculum, from sportsmen and women, celebrities, business leaders and so on. The curious fact is that while lessons learned in school may be forgotten soon, lessons picked up from some favorite persons remain firmly etched in our memories for a long time.

This is due to our admiration for such favorite persons. Every human being has a craving for success in his / her life. But many times the life situations are disappointing for the average Joe or Jane. So it will not be a surprise if such persons are hugely impressed by reading the success stories of:

* business leaders who have scaled great heights in their business careers or
* sportsmen/women or film stars who have become the icons and favorites of 1000’s of fans due to their great talents or
* lawyers who have brilliantly solved complex court cases in which the public is highly interested or
* Nobel laureates and so on.

The admiration and adulation for such icons and celebrities will be all the more pronounced if such icons have risen from very humble backgrounds, surmounted many setbacks in their lives and have become outstanding successes due to their persistence and grit.

Since the average Joe’s or Jane’s go through several stages of failures and rejections in their lives, they frequently suffer from low self-confidence and get attracted to such icons when they come to know about them through various media stories.

So they develop a craze to read about them, see and hear them on TV channels, like to meet them in person if possible so that they can hope to get inspiration for themselves.

But many times such adulation and admiration do not get translated into positive action, becoming instead a wish journey of dreams and nothing else. This is especially so due to the media’s craze for highlighting all the scandals, scams and other negative news about celebrities in a sensational manner. But when positive information has to be provided, there is no guarantee that the same prominence for such positive news may be provided to them by the media.

This leads to an impression on the minds of many people especially youngsters to associate glamor with success. Anything to do with hard work and difficulties in the lives as described in the media may not appeal to them.

This may be the main reason for them to fall for schemes which promise instant success or get rich quick schemes again and again.

They may do well to study the lives of celebrities like Warren Buffett, who in spite of being a celebrity still lives in the same house he purchased many years ago and leads a very frugal life. He is not associated with fashion statements.

The largest secret of his success is his practice of looking for real values in the financial statements of companies which stocks he would like to analyze for investment purposes. He does not merely restrict himself to know what profits the companies earned or their stock prices. Needless to say to arrive at such decisions he has to do tremendous hard work poring over several documents over a lengthy period of time.

We should realize that the meaning of hard work is to look for value and how to search for it in any project.

This is how we can learn from leaders.

Featured Image: The Muse

Source by S. Balaraman