موفقیت سفری متداوم است

039 - Success Is a Continuous Journey

Hello there! Kevin here with another TED Tuesday lesson for you, taking some of the fantastic TED Talks and breaking them down, talking about some of the main ideas and also helping you figure out some of the vocab and expressions used in there you might not know.

In this TED Talk, Richard St.John reminds us that success is not a one-way street but a constant journey, if you remember from a few months back, I talked about a TED Talk called

“8 Secrets of Success” by Richard St. John, in that talk, Richard talks about things that are necessary to become successful, the 8 things that make us successful, and in this talk, he follows up and says that success is not a oneway street but a constant journey, you don’t start from the bottom, get to the top, and you’re done. It’s a cycle and Richard uses the story of his business rise and fall to illustrate a valuable lesson, when we stop trying … we fail.

So even if you reached success, if you stopped doing those 8 things that make us successful, we’ll fail, so that’s the lesson for today’s TED Tuesdays.

If you want transcripts to the episode, go to feelgoodenglish.com/member, and become a successful English speaker.

So Richard starts his talk asking why so many people become successful and then fail,they do everything that leads up to success but when they get there, they stop.

They figure they’ve made it, meaning they figured they’ve become successful, if you make it you say I’ve made it! ,means you’ve reached success and they get into their comfort zone and they stop doing the things that made them successful and then they crash.

Success Is a Continuous

Journey - Ted Tuesdays

LISTEN HERE

And then, Richard talks about his own story, he got to success or whatever he was wanting to do but then he stopped and he figured… Hey, I’m good enough. I don’t need to improve anymore.

He thought he was this hot-shot guy,hot-shot is somebody who is powerful, successful. Somebody that people admire… he’s the hot-shot.Tom Cruise thinks he’s a hot-shot. But what happened to him is he got into this creative block, meaning he couldn’t come up with new ideas, and one of the reasons for that is, a lot of money started coming his way. Before he was focused on clients and projects but when all these money started pouring in. To pour in means to come quickly. To pour is usually with liquid,you pour liquid into a glass. You pour your nice cold beer into a glass, money’s pouring in, money’s coming in like water. Pouring in. Job offers are pouring in, means you’re getting a lot of job offers pouring in… Pour…P-O-U-R. Pour. Pouring in.

So then he’s talking about money with his stockbroker, the person that deals with stocks and his real estate agent, a real estate agent sells houses and buys houses, so he was buying houses and things but he wasn’t talking to his clients but then he says a black cloud formed over his head and outwardly, outside of himself, he looked successful but inwardly, inside of himself he was depressed , so he made a joke about how to fix it is to buy a fast car, but it didn’t help.

So he got depressed and he realized money doesn’t buy happiness but it can buy Prozac.

Another joke is Prozac is an antidepressant, and then he found himself just floating along, floating along meaning, not worrying about anything, not caring about anything… He couldn’t care less if clients ever called. To care less, this is a good expression. (To) care less means you really care zero about something, you don’t have any opinion about it, I care less, I could care less.

Using the phrase, I couldn’t care less, say Hey, you’re (or) somebody tries to tell you the boss is really upset right now… Nah, I couldn’t care less meaning you don’t have an opinion, it doesn’t matter to you, it’s of zero importance.

So I could care less, I couldn’t care less… You could use that, I couldn’t care less. So then Richard talks about clients didn’t call, his business started failing, and they took their money somewhere else and his business dropped like a rock; i imagine you know what that means, drop like a rock… A rock is heavy.

His business crashed, so then he lose all his employees and he became a very small business again, there’s nobody for him to manage, so he went back to the projects he loved, he worked harder, he did all those things that he talked about in his TED Talk, all those things that lead up to success.

It took 7 years, it took a long time, but in the end it grew bigger and bigger and he followed the 8 Principles of Success.

Summarising, he learned success is not a one-way street, it’s a continuous journey, and if we avoid the Success to Failure Syndrome, we can continue to realise success. Follow the 8 Principles in his first talk.

By the way, if you haven’t seen that talk, it’s 3 minutes long but very powerful, very inspiring.

That’s it for today’s TED Tuesday lesson, hope you keep fighting for happiness and success.

One thing that will bring happiness and success is to go over to feelgoodenglish.com to get the transcript to this episode, Go to feelgoodenglish.com/member or just go to feelgoodenglish.com, go find it there as well.

And how about a success joke for you today;

So a reporter asks a bank president,

“Sir, what is the secret for success?”And the bank president said “Two words,”, and the reporter, “Sir, what are they?”.

“Right decisions,”

And the reporter, “And how do you make right decisions?” “One word” said the bank president

“And, sir… What is that?”

“One word- Experience.”

“And, sir… How do you get experience?” said the reporter “Two words,”

“And sir, what are they?”

Bank president: “Wrong decisions”

Making mistakes leads to you becoming a bank president.

See you in the next lesson