Successful people have three things in common – they know where they are now, they know where they want to be, and they move along that path daily. Their actions become the key determinants of their success. The accumulated messages of their biographies and autobiographies provide added insights into their personal qualities, offering model for you to emulate as you set and chart your own path. Here are those qualities and the actions required.
1. Know where you’re going
Knowing where you’re going is part of the success story. Although your vision will encounter setbacks (we’re told envisioned futures usually have less than 70 percent chance of being achieved), visions help to transform possibilities into realities. As the saying goes, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll finish up somewhere else.”
2. Believe in yourself
Successful people believe in themselves, confident in the knowledge that they can achieve. Their actions broadcast that belief and provide freedom and power. They let nothing limit their potential. Positive affirmations can be effective means of reinforcing that belief.
3. Be open to opportunities
Your openness to opportunities will ensure continuing flow of them. Guard against negative thoughts and inaction limiting your potential to achieve. Some success stories indicate such an abundance of opportunities that choosing which ones to pursue is made most difficult. Spreading yourself and your resources too thinly must be avoided.
4. Set goals that challenge
Successful people know that what they focus on grows, and goals help to provide the necessary focus and direction. Challenging goals bring out the best in people.
5. Accept responsibility
Successful people don’t blame others when things don’t go as planned. The responsibility for the fulfilment of your dreams lies with you. The power to succeed – or to fail – is yours. And no one can take that away.
6. Build desire
You have to want something badly enough to let nothing stand in your way of achieving it. But that does not suggest any recourse to aggression; many success stories depict quiet achievers. Desire helps to overcome seemingly insurmountable goals. Successful people, we’re told, help to make things happen.
7. Demonstrate courage
Courage is special personal quality that helps you to distinguish between what ought to be feared and what need not be feared. Though history’s successful people have never backed away from any encounter that threatened their progress, they made certain they were around to ‘fight another day’.
8. Learn from failure
The law of failure is one of the most powerful of all the success laws because you only really fail when you stop trying – that’s why successful people never fail. Setbacks simply provide them with essential feedback to help them chart their course.
9. Make honesty the best policy
Cheats may prosper – but not for long. You will be called on daily to choose between honesty and dishonesty, and those choices contribute to your reputation. With honesty, there is no middle-ground; you can’t be ‘a little honest’ or ‘slightly dishonest’. You’re either honest or dishonest.
10. Strive for excellence
Achieving excellence is the pinnacle, and it’s attained by few. Make sure you go beyond the call of duty, doing more than others expect. Excellence comes from striving, maintaining the highest standards, looking after the smallest detail, and going that extra mile. Successful people never compromise their standards.
11. Be persistent – and be flexible
The power to hold on in the face of adversity and the power to endure -these are the qualities of winner. Persistence is the ability to face setbacks without losing sight of your destination. Persistence is the skill of doing everything necessary to reach your goals including making adjustments based on the feedback received.
12. Take action
Action combines all of your insights, experiences and talents into physical performance. If you’ve set your vision, selected opportunities, rallied your determination and desire, it’s time to act. Outlaw procrastination. Without action nothing happens.
13. Love what you do
Love is the most important ingredient of success. Successful people rarely make distinctions between work and many of their other activities: they do what they do because they love it. Sharing that passion with select few makes all the effort worthwhile.
Management Memo
A traveller in ancient Greece met an old man on the road and asked him how to get to Mt Olympus. The old man who happened to be Socrates, replied, “If you really want to get to Mt Olympus, just make sure that every step you take is in that direction.”
