3 Fundamental Steps To Success

Achieving success can be a complicated concept to grasp. How do you define success from a personal stance, and how can you properly succeed in what you hope to achieve? Here, I have provided 3 fundamental steps that you can use to implement in your game, whether you are on or off the court. Read and digest these steps as you learn to apply them as a basketball player and amongst your everyday life.

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1. Create Your Dream

The first primary step to achieving the success you desire means creating that big picture dream. Having a clear, visual understanding of what it is you are aiming for will ultimately help you know whether or not you have made any progress towards your goal during the process.

Create your basketball dream in a “big picture” bird’s eye view. Is it making your high school team? Or the NBA? Maybe your basketball goal and your overall life goal are similar or even the same. Highlight what your version of success is and what your dream looks like in view of that success.

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2. Believe In Yourself

A key element of achieving any level of success in your game is being able to recognize where you are strongest and where you are weakest as a player. If you struggle to fully know what your strengths and weaknesses are, ask your coach or someone that you can trust for an honest second opinion. Once you have an understanding of the areas where you naturally excel and the areas where you need to put in extra work, you can move on to developing confidence in yourself.

Throughout life, our confidence often gets stepped on by those naysayers and haters or trampled on by our circumstances. When this happens, it is important to keep moving forward with authentic self-confidence and knowing who you are to the very core. Knowing what you are truly about allows the distractions of people and circumstances that bring you down to be just mere background noise. No matter what you are attempting to achieve - you have to believe in yourself as a person.

Believing in yourself may seem like a simple concept, but in reality it can be tough to consistently be able to truly believe in your own potential. Your max potential is rooted in believing in yourself as a player and as you, without caring about what others have to say or think about you.

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3. Create a Plan/Blueprint

Creating a blueprint of your dream can be understood as the tactical steps towards your dream. It is helpful to find someone who has already achieved what it is that you want to achieve (i.e. if you want to go to the NBA, find someone who has either gone to the NBA, has helped someone get there, or played a significant role in a player’s life to achieve that) and ask them for advice. Think of your plan to be the stairway to your dream. Custom make a plan for yourself based on where you want to be and what you want to achieve. For example, if you are in grade 7 and you want to go to the NBA, you are going to have to make some kind of a blueprint in order to get there.

Always realize that life brings about unexpected events and opportunities that might change the direction of your plan, but go along with the changes and accept the journey as it naturally comes. There might be a different way to your dream than you had originally planned out, and that is okay, but keeping a blueprint handy will help keep you focused on your goals.

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How do you define success and what steps would you take to achieve it? Is it a challenge that gets you excited, something that comes easily to you, or is the idea of it straight up complicated? What ever your take is at this very moment in your life, know that it is possible to succeed in your dreams so long as you include all of these steps into the process. These steps go hand in hand and you will need all three steps in order to succeed.