How I Overcome and Win Over My Worst Enemies by Turning Them Into Faithful, Lifelong Allies

This post is for those who would like to rethink the popular idea that most successful people are simply lucky or have had some kind of a break in life. I will admit it right away: for a very long time, while I wasn’t nearly as successful as I wanted to be, I used to be one of these ‘thinkers.’ Things changed once I abandoned this mindset and replaced it with a beginner’s mindset so I could clean up my brain of counterproductive habits and make room for the learning process on how to accomplish lasting, consistent success.  

I am addressing this tendency to view successful individuals primarily as lucky, as well as the mentality of choosing to rely on luck to succeed, because such perception of success can be deceiving and discouraging at the same time. You are deceiving yourself if you prefer to use others’ luck as an excuse for your lack of success, based on the assumption that you have been repeatedly handed poor or bad luck. And, you would likely feel quite discouraged from trying to turn your life around if you sincerely believe that most successful people are where they are today because of mere luck. 

Bad luck isn’t necessarily or always your enemy. Other people aren’t always enemies or standing in your way, either. More often than not, these are all perceived obstacles. You are reading this from a person who used to blame everybody and their mother for her ‘bad luck,’ so I have every reason to say that such perception of the world is a vast self-deception that can spiral out of control for as long as you let it do so within your own limited mindset or worldview, call it as you please. 

Could our perception be wrong? Could it get tuned up ever so slightly to help us deal with the outward obstacles by setting the inner barriers straight first? This may surprise you, but the directional change needed to accomplish a clearer picture can be really small. Consistency in the application, however, is the key here. That’s the big commitment — not to slide back into the old mindset as soon as things don’t go the way you planned. Instead of giving up or bending over to compromise beyond your ethical principles, approach the challenge differently to get your goal accomplished. 

Successful people know who their real enemies are. Those who have conquered these enemies early on have become successful early in their lives. Those who have recognized and dealt with their worst enemies later in their lives have, too, become successful, just not as early as the first group. That’s all. Been there, done that. A successful person does not seek solutions from the outside first. He or she knows that the biggest obstacles to success are oftentimes within us, just as the answers for how to become successful are readily within us, waiting to be explored and acted on.

Some call it mindset. I like that and have adopted this word in my own search for solutions. But there are components within a mindset that need to be looked at in more detail. 

I remember many of the fascinating fairy tales and stories my parents read to me when I was little, and the ones I read later on, growing up. Pretty much, each had a good and a bad character. The characters were either friends or enemies. There was always some conflict going on, or a conflict occurred shortly after a rosy picture was drawn of the main characters’ baseline existence. Conflicts eventually resolved — the good guys won, and the bad guys lost. The good poor guys magically became rich but remained good, while the rich bad guys got punished or lost everything yet were still perceived as bad…

And then came real life. It slowly made its way into my perception and started pushing all these stories around in a strange mix of complex conundrums, making me question each value statement time and again as it seemed that many of them had a hard time fitting into real-life situations. It is still interesting to me how we are familiarized early on with the concept of outside enemies and troublemakers. We then quickly learn to see those in our circle who present potential or actual threats and then learn to either cope with such people or avoid them as allowed by the circumstances. These outside inconveniences or problems are thought of by many as the daily life challenges and obstacles to our prosperity and well-being.

But these are truly external factors — factors easy to point out as reasons for our perceived misfortune, and easy to blame for our lack of success, which can subsequently lead to decreased sense of self-worth and compromise our self-esteem and self-confidence. 

We then decide to start searching more in-depth. Someone from somewhere tells us that the answers are within us. What does this mean? Does it mean we did something wrong or have been doing things the wrong way for years?

Well, it depends. Who are the real enemies? Why are they harder to see and reckon with?

Hidden within us, sometimes deep enough for us to legitimize our own blindness (or deafness) to their existence are the four determinants to long-term poor or nonexistent success. We’ve all heard of them a couple of times in our lives. They are called laziness (indolence of mind), apathy (indifference), impatience (fast-food mentality), and fear of failure. With these being basic elements of us, it can be hard to recognize their significance and the extent to which they impede our progress towards success. 

My life changed (no, not suddenly!) once I declared an eternal war on my indolence of mind, my indifference, my lack of patience with a process, and my fear of failing yet again. Ever since I made that decision, it’s been a battle with my epic laziness, apathy, impatience, and fear of yet another failure, day in and day out. Shortly after it started, it became clear to me that this war had no scheduled end date. Fourteen years later, an end date to it is still nowhere to be seen. Sorry to disappoint you. It simply never ends.  

I have learned throughout my years of working with mentors that successful people find ways of overcoming anxiety, worry, and distress by simply performing the very tasks that cause these uncomfortable feelings anyway, and many times, until the desired results outweigh the discomfort and take control over the insecurity. It is an odd type of diplomacy in which you craft a working process between yourself and yourself to convince both sides of you to become friends. But you’re not just any kind of friends. You are friends based on mutual accountability, which is only possible if you have set specific, measurable short-term and long-term goals based on your dreams — so the dreams can be transformed into reality.  

How do you make friends with your absolute worst enemies? Making amends with these four is, obviously, out of the question. I learned I needed a contract, so I crafted one. I resolved to entrust to my four worst enemies the important task of keeping me accountable for procrastinating on the action steps that led to the completion of my goals. As a result of this contract, and due to the fact that some of my goals require multiple action steps, my four worst enemies and I are in a constant state of dedicated and sophisticated collaboration! Yup!  

The contract works both ways. By my having allowed these four to hold me accountable, I have earned the right to do the same with them. So, once I acknowledge their presence and find out what motions I need to make in order to either fix a problem, finish up a project, or start a new ambitious project, I can then send my laziness, apathy, impatience, and fear of failure on their merry way and demand of them to not come back for a chunk of time predetermined by me. I then escort them out of my mind to clear a significant space for the focus I need to perform the challenge I have set to overcome. 

The good news is this approach leaves no room for the rationalizing of and justification for inaction, either! The even better news is that with practice, this whole process of mind tuning happens almost instantaneously. 

Rest assured, there is no danger of the four enemies turned into allies getting lost and not coming back sooner or later in the day. It really takes no effort on my part to keep these four faithful for a lifetime. This is because they are an integral part of my personality, which I have learned to deal with by personal choice! The only effort needed is to continue treating them as allies by remaining vigilant and quickly recognizing each time your mindset starts descending or sliding back into laziness, apathy, impatience, and fear of (yet another) failure.