First of all, happy new year everyone! I hope that 2022 brings all your wishes and dreams to life. Today I thought I would talk about something that's surprisingly personal to me, but is indespensible to know regardless of your age. How to attain success and make your dreams come true.

 Being teenagers, one of our most defining and likely places to wish for success is at school, or perhaps something academic--so that will be the example I'm going to use here, but these tips can really be applied in any aspect of life.

1)Be clear on what you want to achieve, how you want to achieve it, and establish why

 Having no drive or reason behind doing or setting a goal usually results in a futile attempt to achieve success, it leaves you with two things. Procrastination and idleness. Say you want to get good grades at school as this is what makes you happy, there is no way of getting there without planning out exactly how you will do it. For me, I knew that I had to create a study and homework timetable (using the pomodoro method) as this kept me disciplined in school studies, also spending time personally reflecting on my school work/exams gave me a vivid picture of the improvements I needed to make, so that my success would be sustainable. I established exactly how I would get there, but this is not where it stops--there is no point planning things if you will not take action. Action-taking is unimaginably important to get closer and closer to your vision, it's something very challenging to do because unlike the planning process (where you could write all sorts of impressive steps and actions), you now have to really act upon it and be self-driven, but trust me, once you take that first step outside your comfort zone, you will already see glimmerings of success and this will remind you of your why and keep you going. Once I started following my routine, and put more focus into school work, I felt more productive and started seeing tiny improvements in my test scores, that just got higher and higher with time. Thanks to my discipline, hard work, vision, and clarity. But above all, it was because of my action-taking skills.

2) Don't let your results define you and always come back to your why

 A lot of people give you advice on how to attain success, but very few people talk about what happens after, so I will today. Once you start achieving these results, and you feel like you are in close proximity with your goal, you might find that you start to slack off--or more accurately, become a little less disciplined. This is what happened to me, because I thought to myself, finally I've reached what I want...now I can go and fully relax. Whilst its important to relax, losing your discipline is a completely different thing and might cause you to see a plummet in your results,I know that this happened to me and my friends at school started pointing it out to me in a teasing way. This made me truly doubt myself and my capabilities, because the very friends that congratulated me when I did well, turned their back on me now. So always remember one thing—the only person that knows every single thing about you without fault is you. Not them. This will help you stay disciplined and you will unconsciously come back to your why. Why did I start this? Why do I work so hard for this dream? What would the ambitious me from then have said right now? Push yourself harder and harder. You can do it!

3)Envision yourself achieving your goal and focus on those emotions

 One of the best ways to stay put, is to think of the successful you. The top student you want to be, the grammy award winning musician, the chosen one for the teen ink mag, the best-selling author of the decade, no matter how big or small it is, just imagine it. At the end of the day, we all just want to feel one thing:happy. Envisioning your goal will encourage you to start acting with determination, perseverance and hard work, it should help you to tackle your habit of procrastination (that unfortunately only gets worse and worse, with a seemingly infinite access to technology).

 If these tips help you in any way, please let me know so I can write more articles like this--because the 13 year old me would have found this life changing. I would also be super happy to answer any questions you might have regarding this topic--feel free to comment :) !

 Remember you can do this! I believe in you, and you should too--because you are unique, and no one else can reproduce what you do. There's only one person who can offer them to the world...that's you. Don't forget that.