(NEW YORK) — Emma Grede, a British entrepreneur and the mastermind behind brands like SKIMS and Good American is sharing her secrets on how she built a successful career.
Grede is CEO of Good American, a fashion line on which she partners with Khloé Kardashian, serves as chairperson of the nonprofit 15 Percent Pledge and has also made her mark on ABC’s hit series Shark Tank.
The 41-year-old businesswoman, also a mentor on and executive producer of Side Hustlers on The Roku Channel, told Good Morning America that one secret to her success is thinking about her failures as much as she thinks about her accomplishments.
“I think often we don’t talk about those failures. I’m the opposite. I do [it] all the time,” she explained. “Because I know that everything that I’ve done, that hasn’t worked, I’ve taken a bit of those learnings and spun them into something new.”
Grede also added of her success, “It’s been a mixture of unbelievable hard work and an unbelievable ability to learn from every single mistake that I’ve had.”
Read below for six more tips for success from Grede:
1. Define what you want.
“I’ve been very, very clear about what it is that I want,” she said. “And then I chart a path of how to get there. This is what will make me happy, this is the success that I want. And here are all the incremental steps I’m going to need to get there.”
“Because we all have jobs, we all have a past. And you can take anything that you’re doing and make that situation work for your next situation, so long as you’re focused on what it is that you want. And I often think people are not clear about what it is that they want, you know, I want to be happy, I want to be successful. What does that mean to be happy? What does it mean to be successful, and I’m a real person that has relied my entire life on having a plan,” she added.
2. Reframe your thoughts.
“I honestly think that my greatness is, really, it kind of comes down to mindset,” Grede said, “It starts like first thing in the morning, and I wake up and my day is just chocked full of problems, but I can think, ‘oh my goodness, I have so many issues today’ or I can think, ‘I get to do this.'”
She continued, “And when I say mindset, I mean, how you think – the stories that you tell yourself, right, we have a constant conversation going on in our own head often. And the difference between success and failure in my life is really so much down to the way that I think and how I control those stories and the way I approach every day, and how that mindset leads you into certain habits and rituals around your life and your work that really, really set you up for success.”
3. Make gratitude part of your routine.
Grede said she reinforces a gratitude mindset shift every day, like when brushing her teeth.
“In the morning, I wake up, and it’s like, the first thing I do is not reach for my phone, but it’s really to go into this moment of gratitude,” Grede said. “And when you practice gratitude, it shifts your focus.”
Grede added, “You can talk yourself up and into anything or out of it, and so if you can start to change the way you think, you change the way you act.”
“What you think you become,” she continued. “In my career, and in my life, it’s literally what’s going on [in my mind] and how I speak to myself every day that’s really made the difference.”
4. Remember the ‘rule of thirds’
“My mom would say to me, ‘Emma, you’re not better than anybody else, but nor is anyone better than you.'” Grede recalled. “I think that’s been just really important for me to think about and to play out in my life every day, but I was also really raised with this idea that not everything should go well for you all the time.”
Grede said she lives her life in a way where she expects the “high highs” as well as the “low lows.”
Grede likened what she calls the “rule of thirds” to chasing a dream, completing a task that was hard or the unexpected.
“You’re going to be happy about one-third of the time, the other third of the time, you’re going to feel like kind of okay, and the other third of the time, you’re going to feel pretty terrible,” Grede said. “You have to expect that you’ll have those really, really difficult days.”
She continued, “The rule of thirds has really helped me to figure out, how do I balance those things? How do I think about it? How do I set my expectations up?”
5. Put ambitions ahead of fears.
“Fear is something that can really hold you back — fear of failure, fear of embarrassment, fear of leaving the security of whatever it is that you have,” Grede said. “I think that you have to put your ambition ahead of your fear. You have to make sure that you can grab on to what it is that you really want.”
Grede acknowledged that fear can sometimes be a motivator, as long as it stays in perspective.
“Sometimes, it’s good to have some [fear] in the back of your head, but it’s got to stay in the back,” she said. “You can’t put it in your future.”
6. Stay true to your dream.
“I honestly believe that anyone can achieve greatness if they’re really true to themselves,” Grede said. “If you make a decision, a clear decision, about what it is that you want, and what you believe is important to you, you have to create and make every single decision you make and every move you make going towards that one decision.”
“And that is one of the most important things: be clear about what it is that you want,” she added. “Be intentional about what it is that you want, and go after it without apology.”
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