Success - How can success be defined?

Do you wonder how one can be so successful? What are their secrets? People often said, “Success is 99% hard work and 1% luck." The path to success is not an easy one. One must have a strong will and make right decisions at the right time. Success comes with one's determination, opportunity and a little of luck.

Determination is needed to achieve great results. What makes successful people different from the rest is that they have this common "Never give up until I get what I want" attitude. Not many people supported Maria Bartiromo to become a reporter to broadcast live from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange but she became the first female reporter anyway. Yes, she did have a lot of pushback but what made her succeeded? This is what she said, “Stamina, for me, is just coming back and coming back and doing it again and again." Failure is part of the 'successful' journey, one needs determination to accept the failure as part of the process to success.

Seizing the opportunity is the stepping stone to success. Having the talent, the intelligence or whatever it takes to be successful would not necessarily lead to success. Opportunity will not just appear suddenly, one has to find, chase or hunt for it. One of Randy Pausch's childhood dreams was being in zero gravity, not exactly being an astronaut. He just wanted the floating experience. His childhood dream becomes true because he "hunted" the opportunity. While doing his proposal for a certain program provided by NASA, he grabbed the chance by promising NASA to publicize their team's experiment on more mainstream journals. He succeeded to experience zero gravity because he found out NASA is always eager for good publicity and would allow a journalist from students' hometown to get the ride. Sometime, Opportunity is not directly obvious; One has to notice and grab it to be successful.

Luck plays a part in the path to success. Nichkhun Horvejkul is the only Thai, currently well-known in Korea and maybe worldwide, in the K-pop industry. Luck was part of his success in his career. He was randomly casted by JYP Company during a concert held in United States. Before he was chosen to be a trainee, he had to sing and dance in public. Yes, he embarrassed himself; he had no talent in that particular area at all. Usually one has to go through auditions to make it through and with skills like the past Nichkhun had, the judges would ask you to stop performing right away. He was a lucky man for that moment.

Ingredients for success are not only working hard on what you want. Imagine you are baking a chocolate cake for your fiancé for the first time. You may fail at the first few attempts. Determination would drive you to not give up even though the cakes burnt or tasted weird. Offering this cake is the opportunity to show your sweetest love on the upcoming Valentine’s Day. Lastly, you are lucky that the oven is not on fire after over using it. One needs the perfect ingredients; determination, opportunity and the luck to be successful. Without any of these missing.