How can you be a successful pastry chef ?

Try to apprentice in a bakery. Offer to do it for free if you have to, but you will gain a lot of knowledge on how things are done now. After that you have to use your imagination to improve on recipes and you can get some ideas from the current fruit of the season. Not just what is in season though. There always seems to be a fruit people go gaga over, like kiwi. Use that, twist it around and go from there.

You will need to practice a lot, and learn exactly what the rest of the pastry business does. One way to get started is by looking at pastry recipes or asking people who work in a pastry bakery to see how pastries and made and marketed. Then, once you learn how things are currently done, you can try to improve upon the existing way of doing things. But being better implies being different, and it's hard to be different if you don't know what other people do because there is no comparison to see how you are different from them.