Mel’s Three Pillars of a Successful Life

My son, Adar, recently asked me what, in my opinion, are the three pillars of success? It depends of course, on what you define as success, and what you think leads to it.

Success for me, beyond nurturing a loving, caring family is doing meaningful things with one’s life, creating, learning, innovating, sharing. Here are my three pillars. What are yours?

The first pillar: Acquiring unanticipated skills. Not the ones that everyone expects you to acquire. The ones that appear ‘useless’ and ‘superfluous’ at the time but turn out to be critical in your career. The ones that let you “think between the boxes”. You can acquire them by taking weird courses and working at odd jobs. Really odd jobs.

The second pillar is learning to recruit your demons. Not identifying them. Not exorcising them. Not learning to control them. Not taming them. Recruiting them to work for you.

I had agoraphobia and didn’t fly for years. When I learned to fight back, I flew so much that I became a ‘Gold Card member’ on BA.

Who/what are your demons? What do you have to do to recruit them?

The third pillar? Create your fate.That sounds like an oxymoron. Of course you cannot control all the aspects of your life. But you can make major decisions that changed the course and meaning of your life. Have you ever got up and moved 7000 kilometers? Have you changed your profession or invented a new one? These are examples of creating your fate.

The fourth bonus?

Storytelling. That includes everything from oral presentations, to written presentations, to story writing, to interviews and networking.