(Originally posted on Quora)

Original Question:

What advice would you give to young adults about success: defining it, achieving it, etc?

There are a few things that are crucial for one to achieve success:

• Understand what it is you want out of life – only you can answer that – and set goals to achieve them

• Find a few good mentors who are willing to help you with advice on your career, and keep regular contact with them – I call this your personal board of directors

• Invest your time wisely; try to learn new things or ways to improve yourself, whether it’s languages or software skills, etc.

• Realize that other people’s definition of “success” will be different from yours, so do not attempt to follow others’ models of success

• Attend networking workshops if you can, to meet and mingle with people who might connect you with a job that leads to your career, and perhaps find mentors at the same time

• Avoid being around negative people because they may influence you into negative thoughts by their constant negativity

As for defining what success is, again, that goes to what you want to accomplish in life and it is something you might need to spend some time thinking about. It very well could be simple things such as having a positive mindset, being passionate about your work but not letting it stress you out, having a tough skin, taking care of yourself, seeing other points of views and not just your own, knowing how much money you need every month, etc.

However, that is up to you to decide. 🙂