The greatest risks to success

"Success leaves traces", a much quoted statement puts it in a nutshell. Those who are successful by their own efforts think and act in a certain way, which very likely contributes to success. However, all these success factors can be massively cancelled out by dangers that many see and pay too little attention to. The conclusion is then sometimes that the success factors "do not work for me or us". In reality, however, one has often only sabotaged oneself by disregarding the risks to success.

Here are three, from my experience with my clients, big dangers that lurk for you and your team if you want to become more successful:

Risk No. 1: We fly too low.

Of course we have to be careful not to fly so high that we run out of air and the wax in our wings melts in the sun (according to Icarus). But: Icarus should also not fly too low, because otherwise the waves would have caught him. And this is exactly what I see with most leaders and teams: they fly so close above the ground that they constantly touch the surface. The flight altitude relates to goals, to one's own demands on behavior, to my tolerance thresholds, and more.

So: If we want to become significantly more successful, a big danger is that we don't develop the thrust to get to an appropriate height. Then we always fall back to the ground of the current state, which just does not help us to significantly increase our success.

Risk No. 2: We think too small.

What would we have to do to achieve ten times as much? This is a question that evokes great thinking. Because you can't achieve such an increase with your current mindset. You have to think in completely different dimensions.

You always find this when you look at the biographies of particularly successful people. The commitment (physical, temporal, financial) is often increased tenfold, often a hundredfold, in order to achieve the lofty goals (see point 1).

Risk No. 3: We wait too long.

A great deal of success is prevented by not moving forward quickly enough, but by always waiting. I see this again and again in strategy projects, where we create a great vision and define implementation steps, but people then hesitate to take the first step.

In addition to points 1 and 2, successful people and teams are characterized above all by the fact that they quickly accelerate and create facts on the way to greater successes. Therefore my tip: Make it a habit to go ahead as soon as you know where and why. Then you can always correct.

Eliminate risks to success

So here you have three big risks on the way to massively more success. Getting these out of the way is often more important than rushing into any measures.

To the author:
Volkmar Völzke is a success maximizer. Book author. Consultant. Coach. Speaker. www.volkmarvoelzke.ch