Five Tenets of Success

COURTESY begins with you. You have to learn respect and care for your own body and mind before working towards better relations with other people. Proper care can be as simple as good personal hygiene, and as complicated as making a drastic career move. In all cases, you should strive to achieve happiness and sustain your mental and physical health, then work on giving others the same respect and consideration.

INTEGRITY in simplest terms, means HONESTY: Honesty with yourself and honesty with those around you. However, to be totally honest with yourself, you first have to know yourself. This is the other, deeper aspect of integrity: Knowing yourself and using that knowledge to make more objective decisions about your life, about those people who affect your life, and about those on whose lives you have an effect.

PERSEVERANCE is also know as “Stick-to-itiveness” or tenacity. For most people, it is one of the hardest tenets to maintain on a day-to-day basis. Successful perseverance has three phases: Making conscious decision on whether or not to accept a given task (remember integrity? It comes into play at this point); creating a plan of action that will help you achieve the goals you’ve set for the task, should you accept it; and finally, making the commitment to carry through with the task to the end, regardless of what sacrifices have to be made. The first phase is often the most difficult one to deal with, because sometimes you will have to say no to an opportunity. The third phase, on the other hand, is the one you can practice most often; and if you make a habit of firmly sticking to your commitments, you have the opportunity to achieve the greatest potential in each area of your life.

SELF-CONTROL affects all aspects of your daily existence. If you learn to maintain a steady level (be it physical or mental) in all of your activities, others will perceive you as a more reliable, solid person. This means controlling your good moods as well as your bad ones; trying to minimize your excesses, whether they are in exercise, work or play. Maintain consistency in all of your actions at home, school and work. In that manner you will best represent yourself, your business and T’ai Chi Chih.

INDOMITABLE SPIRIT or unconquerable spirit ties together the other four tenets and refers to the most fundamental part of you as a person: Your soul or basic self. When you see an athlete nearing exhaustion, then reaching down deep inside and somehow pulling out the strength to win, you see indomitable spirit at work. When you see one person stand firm against a crowd because of an unshakable belief, you see indomitable spirit. That spirit is the refusal to allow defeat; it is the strength to stand up for what you believe, no matter what the odds against you. In order to achieve this, all five tenets must be exercised, regularly and with great intensity.

Before reaching out to teach others, be sure your own life is in order. For example, the old Chinese saying: “What is truly within, will always be manifested without”. From my personal experience I’ve found that the best teachers are those who truly believe in and practice what they teach. It is my consummate belief that the diligent application of these basic five tenets will bring about great insight and personal success!

– Mark S. Harrell
Los Gatos, CA

Used with permission.