In this article, winning is not defined as being number one.  Neither does it suggest beating anyone else to achieve something.  The word winning is used in a broader sense.  It means to achieve that which you are capable of; to develop and use your potential.  In other words winning is synonymous with success.

Also, because of the cumbersome practice of trying to accommodate both sexes by using “he/she” in sentences, I have chosen to use the male gender throughout.  This is simply an expedient method and is, in no way, downplaying or disregarding the equality of gender.

For years individuals have sought to find the secrets of success from those who have achieved greatness.

At first, researchers expected to find the characteristics of success by studying the backgrounds, circumstances, education and personalities of successful people.

However, their findings proved fruitless as no common denominators could be found from their observations.  Winners come from all walks of life and have vastly different behaviours and traits:

• some have a magnetic personality, others do not;
• some have a great deal of education, others only rudimentary schooling;
• some are highly creative, others seem to lack imagination;
• some are assertive, others less so.

These seeming incompatibilities made researchers wonder if in fact there were any common attributes.  Perhaps being successful or winning in life is, after all, a matter of luck or heredity.

Some researchers were, however, not prepared to give up.  So they decided to investigate the matter from a different angle. Instead of examining external behaviours, they switched to looking at internal factors such as attitudes, beliefs and thought processes.

And here they found the so-called “secrets”;  attributes which are common to all people who have achieved greatness.

In a nutshell, winners share the following characteristics:

• they believe they can succeed;
• they know themselves;
• they know what they want;  and
• they persistently motivate themselves, especially in the face of adversity.

Now let’s examine each of these characteristics in greater detail.

1. Winners believe they can succeed

This is the first attribute of winners.  Unless you have a firm belief and confidence in your potential you will be neither successful nor happy.

Everywhere we encounter people who are immobilised by fear;  who withdraw from taking reasonable risks, who are plagued by a deep sense of inadequacy and who will, as a consequence, never venture towards their ideals.  Why should they?  After all, if an individual does not believe that he can succeed, and is negative towards his own abilities, it would be senseless to expend time and energy in activities that – according to him – will be fruitless.  He would rather engage in comfortable, non- threatening pursuits with which he is familiar, even though they do not achieve much.

Emerson has said that “they conquer who believe they can”. If a person believes he can do something which is important to him, he will find a way to do it.  If it means acquiring special skills then he will acquire them;  if it means going the extra mile then he will go two.  Whatever it is he needs to do he will do, but first he must believe that he can.

There is a lovely verse which encapsulates just what we are saying:

If you think you are beaten, you are;

If you think you dare not, you don’t.

If you want to win but think you can’t

It’s almost a cinch you won’t.

If you think you’ll lose, you’re lost,

For out in the world we find

Success begins with a fellow’s will

It’s all in the state of mind.

If you think you’re outclassed, you are;

You’ve got to think high to rise,

You’ve got to be sure of yourself before

You can ever win a prize.

Life’s battles don’t always go

To the stronger or faster man;

But sooner or later the man who wins

Is the man who thinks he can.

Napoleon Hill in his book “Think and Grow Rich” said that:  what the mind of man can conceive and believe, he can achieve. And Jesus expressed it most succinctly when He said, “Everything is possible for the person who believes.”

However, winners do not only believe in themselves.  They also believe in the future.

Victor Frankl, a psychiatrist whose family was exterminated by the Nazis and who himself faced death many times as an intern in the dreaded Auschwitz concentration camp, relates the following incident in his book “Man’s Search For Meaning”:

The Prisoner who had lost faith in the future – his future – was doomed.  With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold;  he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay.

Usually this happened quite suddenly, in the form of a crisis, the symptoms of which were familiar to the experienced camp inmate.

We all feared this moment – not for ourselves, which would have been pointless, but for our friends.  Usually it began with the prisoner refusing one morning to get dressed and wash or to go out on the parade grounds.  No entreaties, no blows, no threats had any effect.  He just lay there, hardly moving. If this crisis was brought about by an illness, he refused to be taken to the sick-bay or to do anything to help himself.  He simply gave up.  There he remained, lying in his own excreta, and nothing bothered him any more.

I once had a dramatic demonstration of the close link between the loss of faith in the future and this dangerous giving up.  F.., my senior block warden, a fairly well-known composer and librettist, confided in me one day:

“I would like to tell you something, Doctor.  I have had a strange dream.  A voice told me that I could wish for something, that I should only say what I wanted to know, and all my questions would be answered.  What do you think I asked?   That I would like to know when the war would be over for me.   You know what I mean, Doctor – for me!  I wanted to know when we, when our camp, would be liberated and our sufferings come to an end.”

“And when did you have this dream?”  I asked.

“In February, 1945,” he answered.  It was then the beginning of March.

“What did your dream voice answer?”

Furtively he whispered to me, “March thirtieth.”

When F.. told me about his dream, he was still full of hope and convinced that the voice of his dream would be right.  But as the promised day drew nearer, the war news which reached our camp made it appear very unlikely that we would be free on the promised date.  On February twenty- ninth, F.. suddenly became ill and ran a high temperature.  On March thirtieth, the day his prophecy had told him that the war and suffering would be over for him, he become delirious and lost consciousness.  On March thirty- first, he was dead.  To all outward appearances, he had died of typhus.

Those who know how close the connection is between the state of mind of a man – courage and hope, or lack of them – and the state of immunity of his body – will under-stand that the sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect.  The ultimate cause of my friend’s death was that the expected liberation did not come and he was severely disappointed.  This suddenly lowered his body’s resistance against the latent typhus infection.

His faith in the future and his will to live had become paralysed and his body fell victim to illness – and thus the voice of his dream was right after all.

Dr Frankl’s observations have been proved time and again. Before a man can be a success he must have faith; he must believe in himself and he must have faith in his future.

2. Winners know themselves

Truly successful people know themselves, they know their strengths and their weaknesses.  They are honest with themselves and because they do not defend their shortcomings and mistakes they are able to learn from their errors and thus enjoy a continual process of growth and renewal.

Most of us do not really know ourselves.  We seldom evaluate our motives and actions;  instead we employ a variety of ego defence mechanisms to protect ourselves from the pain of truth.

Rather than expose a self which may possibly be ugly or inadequate, we instinctively build walls around ourselves, forgetting that by walling the truth out, we are also walling ourselves in.

It has been said that well adjusted personalities (and a person cannot be genuinely successful unless he is well adjusted) progress through three stages of growth.  These are:

• finding oneself and accepting oneself;
• being oneself; and
• forgetting oneself.

Working from the final stage backwards, we find that winners are able to forget themselves;  they are able to give time and effort to a worthwhile cause which benefits others.  And they can do so only because they are liberated from the bondage of self-centredness.

However, a man cannot forget himself unless he is able to be himself – with no masks or pretences.  People who continually wear masks, who act out roles of pretence, cease to be genuine.  They live counterfeit lives and experience the distress of unhappy, unfulfilled and sham existences.

Yet in order to be oneself it is essential to accept oneself first.   Self-acceptance, though, can only come from self-knowledge.  How can you accept that which you are not aware of?  And how can you change that which you do not own?

People who do not know themselves, and who cannot accept themselves, often hanker for positions or possessions which compensate for their unacknowledged feelings of inadequacy.  Seldom do they try to get in touch with the root cause of their motives.  So they remain enslaved – they are not free to enjoy their station in life or that which they have.

In this category we often find people who are obsessed with the desire for material wealth and for power.   To others, they may justify this craving by saying that they possess the laudable quality of ambition.  In truth such a person may be trying to prove to himself and to others that “He’s okay”.  He feels that as long as he has money, power and material possessions, others will look up to him.  His inner feelings of inadequacy are anaesthetised by the status symbols he accumulates and he keeps running, chasing and accumulating things all his life.  Such is not the success we aspire to.

Of course, not all people who are wealthy and powerful fall into this category.  Many wealthy people have amassed fortunes because they have made great contributions.  The wealth they possess is the result of expressing themselves in sound and honourable practices; it is the reward for having done what they do best and their work has enriched the lives of others.

Those who have enhanced not only their own lives by the quality and fervour of their lifestyles, but also the lives of others and the societies in which they live, are those who are at peace with themselves.  They know themselves and they experience life more fully because they are able to be authentic.  Their lives are balanced and rewarding.  Because they know themselves they can be themselves;  they can also forget themselves and reach for what they want without the complexes and compensations which paralyse so many people.

3. Winners know what they want

Unless you know where you are going and what you want to achieve, your life will tend to have no direction and little meaning.

Thomas Carlyle, a famous philosopher, compared the lives of human beings with ships.  He said that 95% of all people can be compared to ships without rudders.  Subject to every change of mind and tide they are helplessly adrift.  And while they fondly hope that one day they will float into the port of their dreams the truth is that they are far more likely to run aground or end up on the boulders of some rocky coastline.

But the other 5%, the people who have taken the time and trouble to decide on a destination, will sail across the oceans of life.  They know where they are going and they reach one port after another, achieving more in a few short years than most achieve in a lifetime.

If you should climb to the bridge of an ocean liner and ask the captain where he is going, he will tell you in one concise sentence – he knows exactly what his next port of call is, and he gets there.  So should a human life be.

Ask most people whether they have goals and you are likely to receive an affirmative reply from nearly all.  “Of course I have goals”, each will say.  Then ask them what it is they want and they will probably say something like:

“Happiness”; or

“Wealth”; or

“Recognition”, and so on.

These are not goals; they are far too vague.  Instead they are general conditions desired by practically everyone.

On the other hand, ask a successful person what he wants and he will tell you without hesitation.  For example, instead of saying something like,  “I want lots of money”, the successful person will tell you exactly how much money he wants and by when.  And he will put into effect plans to reach his target.

Bear in mind that when we talk about goals we are not necessarily talking about monetary or business goals.  A goal is any worthwhile objective as long as it is explicit.  To pass a specific exam, to run the Comrades Marathon, to own a house, to drive a certain type of car, to come down to a definite weight – all of these are worthy goals; they are easily quantifiable.

In his book, “Alice in Wonderland”, Lewis Carroll puts the principle of goal-setting in wonderful perspective.  Alice arrives at a junction in the road.  Not knowing which way to go, she asks the Cheshire Cat for advice.

“Cheshire-Puss … would you tell me please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

I don’t much care where,” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

Isn’t that so true?  If we don’t know where we are going, any road will take us there and we’ll probably end up where we don’t want to be.

4. Winners persistently motivate themselves especially in the face of adversity

Winners are self-motivated people; they refuse to quit when confronted with problems or difficult situations.

The truly successful person takes responsibility for himself.  He is aware that his life will be governed by what he does and so he gets himself going; he does not wait for someone to push him in the right direction.  Neither does he wait for circumstances to be ideal.

Instead he creates the conditions which he desires by purposeful action.

It is important to realise that anyone who strives for something which is meaningful, will face problems.  Just as a baby will fall many times before he learns to walk, so must you of necessity overcome adversity before you can succeed.

Many employees who resign from a job do so because there are difficulties to overcome and they lose heart.  How different it would be if these same people chose to surmount their obstacles before they decided to change.

Napoleon Hill in his book “The Laws of Success”, says that:

“The measure of a man may be taken very accurately by the extent to which he adapts himself to his environment and makes it his business to accept responsibility for every adversity which he meets, whether the adversity grows out of a cause within his control or not”.

Persistence to a human being is what carbon is to steel.  It will give you the resilience and strength to continue when your feelings tell you to quit.  And it is at this point that successful people stand out from the average.  If, during the dark moments of your life, you keep going, the skies will clear and you will soon enough enjoy the sweet taste of success because you had the courage to persist.