How Eager Are You Towards Achieving Success in Life?
A Book Review – The Success Code: 2022’s empowering, practical guide to maximising your performance, learning new skills and achieving success
By Amanda Dewinter
What is this book about?
“The Success Code” by Amanda Dewinter is a Self-Help book which primarily teaches you how to achieve your goals and get closer to success.
The book consists of 4 main sections and 14 chapters, and is 286 pages long.
In this book, Amanda shows us how we can attain success through 4 major steps. We will talk about each of them in later session of this post.
Amanda pointed out that success is NOT about luck.
Success is about “learning”, and how you can make use of learning to achieve all your desired goals.
The links for purchasing the book are paid links via Amazon or Book Depository which we may receive commissions from qualifying purchases.
Who is this book for?
“The Success Code” is written for readers who wanted to learn about success and how to live a successful life.
I highly recommend this book for readers who have a huge desire to attain success.
This book is also for those who are keen and willing to work towards achieving their goals.
Follow 4 major steps to achieve your goals
The author has helpfully broken down the book into 4 main sections.
These 4 sections are essentially 4 major steps for you to follow to achieve your goals. Let’s find out more about each step below.
Step 1: Find Your Ambition
Success has different meanings to everyone.
Step 1 gears you up in finding the goals that you wanted to achieve.
Amanda suggested to first perform a self-assessment over yourself using the “SWOT” analysis.
Through this exercise you will understand where your strengths and weaknesses lie. Knowing these helps you skillfully approach your goals by applying your strengths and weaknesses.
You can also learn how to set realistic goals by following the SMART model which Amanda describes further in this book.
In addition, Amanda offers a useful technique called creating your own “vision board”.
A “vision board” as suggested, is a record of your visions containing all the ultimate achievements you wanted in your wildest dreams. It should contain elements which are exciting, and that you can relate and refer to everyday to boost your self-motivation.
The author recommended the board be represented physically so that you can grow stronger emotional goals by being able to see it.
As an example, I created my “vision board” by writing and drawing my dream achievements on a notebook that I keep physically. From time to time, I will read my vision board in the notebook and visualise myself attaining all the goals that I have set out.
It’s a wonderful feeling.
Step 2: Supercharge Your Learning
In Amanda’s view, which I wholeheartedly agree with, “success” only comes to you when you are willing to learn.
In this step, you would explore the importance of learning and how it is closely connected to success.
If I can summarise what Amanda tried to convey, the reason why we needed to learn is because learning makes your life happier by giving you purposes.
We all learn for specific purposes, and only through learning can you progress as humans and at the same time achieve your goals in life.
We can learn “how” we can learn by following 3 steps the author suggested. These 3 steps include: 1) Focus your attention 2) Work on it and 3) Move it to your Long-term memory.
Let me briefly introduce them here.
Basically, at the beginning you will need to do a self-exploration by getting to know what you wanted to learn. These may include specific knowledge such as presentation or coding skills.
Once you have decided on what to learn, you should first 1) focus.
You should clear out any distractions and concentrate when upskilling yourself during the process of acquiring this new knowledge or skill.
Then you should 2) “work it out” by actively thinking about the knowledge in your mind.
Finally, it is really about 3) “grinding” by constantly applying the skill and even creating the environment to use the knowledge.
Only through regular practicing would you be able to cement the understanding from the new learning into your mind.
Step 3: Prioritize Your Wellbeing
In this step, the content is quite self-explanatory.
The main idea here is that we need a strong physical body in order to sustain ourselves to achieve success.
Imagine a person who has weak physique. Even if he has strong determination he cannot walk far as his weak body cannot support him.
It follows that a weak person would find it extremely difficult to achieve his goals. Because it would be too challenging for him to weather the wearing down of stamina.
On the other hand, a strong body can carry a strong-minded person a very long way.
In order to get yourself in good shape, you should learn how to manage stress and build healthy habits. The principles are as simple as it sounds, that would be to eat well, sleep well and exercise well.
If you are rich in your stamina, you are on your way to building yourself up to succeed in life.
Step 4: Strengthen Your Resolve
After setting yourself up with a stronger body, it’s important for you to enhance your mentality to the next level at the same time.
In this final step, we learn how to create stronger willpower and build good habits in maintaining it.
From the teaching in the bestselling Atomic Habits by James Clear, it’s not reliable to only use self-motivation to push yourself to achieve your goals.
Instead, you should build yourself around a system of good habits that will help “work you out” by pushing you to perform your tasks, even when you didn’t want to.
One good example would be to get an accountable partner to fetch you to go work out regularly. As reluctant as you may feel, you will feel obliged to go work out when your friend rings your doorbell asking you to go!
Another aspect is to learn how to regularly perform “deep work”. This relates to the work approach introduced by Cal Newport about spending fully committed time in doing the work without any external disturbance. If you are interested in this book you can read my book review here.
The 4 values of success include: have courage, be grateful, be optimistic and take full personal responsibility. These values echo well with the 5 traits of leadership of another well-written book, The Heart of Leadership, which I introduced earlier.
Conclusion
“The Success Code” is a well-structured Self-help guide book easy for most people to read.
It is a rewarding read and I recommend it to you all. I am certain you will learn something valuable from it.
I agree so much with Amanda that Success is all about learning.
This key idea resonated greatly with my purpose of setting up Calm Reading: to learn through reading and change your life.
I think only through learning can we achieve true changes, and only by changes can we move closer to success in life.
I will leave off this post by highlighting a crucial idea introduced in this book.
“The more you learn, the better you can make decisions and choices. By making better decisions, you can lead a life with more meaning and happiness, and of course with more success.“
This is the crux of the “Success Code”.
Thank you for reading and I will see you in the next post!
Read “The Success Code”
The links for purchasing these books are paid links via Amazon or Book Depository which we may receive commissions from qualifying purchases.
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