If you meet successful people, or those whom you consider successful, you shall notice that there are lots of things common to a lot of successful people irrespective of the background or profession they belong. They seem to be coming from similar schools of thought or having graduated from the same university. 

Above all in my observation they seem to be belonging to one religion called the religion of “success”.

Focus on details, leadership in all aspects, interpersonal abilities, ability to get things done, ability to take decisions in seconds that others would stay in dilemmas for ages, and many more things are all common to successful people is not what am trying to address. 

My efforts to observe a few people closely and few from a distance led me to believe what am going to share. This thought began running on my mind ever since my days of involving in marketing in college days when I got a chance to watch a lot of people who made it to glory. This extended my thought process beyond into the world of business, celebrities, sportsters and much more and I began correlating the elements common among all and realised that while a lot of things are common to many they may not be common to all among all communities or professions/backgrounds.

I took examples & noted what I believed & had learnt about them. To start with it was the founder of Facebook - Mark Zuckerberg who went on to believe in his vision of building Facebook to become the most important way to connect with people. He didn’t care if there were many platforms that helped people connect, socialise online and build a social network like the famous Orkut, Myspace or others. He believed in his idea longer than anyone else did to reach a point where no one else could lead him beyond and his belief in his vision guides him and dreams seem to stand evolved to next stage.

Bill Gates built Microsoft starting with windows because he wanted it to become the most user friendly operating system & he believed with all his gut that this was the product that would become the base to many million dollar companies. Today it is true that a lot of applications stand on this OS and they are doing great certainly. A lot has changed form the times of windows 3.1 but Microsoft stands tall as the company that produces value and business. He believed then and today the company does believe in the future of technology that Microsoft can shape.

Larry Page & Sergey Brin stood tall in helping people find content on the net in the fastest way possible and are today scaling the culture of what’s fast and reliable in every dimension possible. Google has moved to become one of the Alphabet and that’s interesting and powerful to watch. The vision is believed in stronger by the day and only getting better.

Sachin Tendulkar believed that he would be able to play international cricket and has set records which are a dream for others. He played longer years than most can imagine. He believed that his game was the most important direction to put all his life’s energy on. He started at 4 & played every terrain & every type of bowler in all types of weather believing that he will give his best to the game each time in every way he needs to. 14 years of practice made him the youngest to enter international cricket.

Saina Nehwal who ranked the World no.1 in badminton recently has shown that endless faith of hers to practice when she was a child & still travelled 25km to practice brought her to achieve global recognition and the top position in her game. Her steely determination is something everyone would love to learn from but above all it’s the belief she kept in herself that moved her towards becoming what she is today.

Shruti Balasa, Bharath GC my great friends are today, the face of Web Solutions & Marketing Solutions respectively. Their belief in what they started out to do has lead clients to them of quality scale and demands to reach them without much of advertising or the need of branding themselves. PLUWIS that is headed by Shruti Balasa & i3 that is headed by Bharath GC has attracted great projects and delivered them with panache. Am sure their continued momentum at work shall attract the best to them and inspire them to do better. Both of them believed in themselves when none believed in them.

Krishna Wage who comes from the advertising background who united the best of the brands to advertise through his firm then along with Abhishek went on to create an app called as SmartQ that was initially challenged by the complexity of the model & took about 12 months of pre-launch work, today has gone on to become the most loved app among IT crowd of major tech parks in Bangalore & couple other cities in india to kill the queue at food courts in these IT Parks. The vision looks firm on killing the queue from the face of the earth.

If I look at my own journey of becoming a speaker, it was a story of belief. A belief that I could deliver to the expectations of the crowd, I could motivate, inspire, help people believe in a message I had, market, sell, enthuse spirit and above all communicate the message I had. I finally look back at 10 years of public speaking with delight today with diversity of delivering sessions to school kids in kindergarten to corporates to directors/principals of schools/colleges to BBMP Workers in Bangalore to talking to bureaucrats of Nepal to the time I simply loved speaking to forum of tourism at Russia.

So the gist of the whole piece here is that it’s BELIEF that is the COMMON element of all successful people and this is that one element that gives rise to everything else. Belief in the idea, self, visions, leadership, in people and eventually in fate that it shall go right. The harder and the longer you can believe in what you are and what you envision to do, the sooner you will make it to the top of the ladder you wish to climb. So I shall just conclude with one word “BELIEVE!!!”