3 Things Successful People Do

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The Journey Is More Fun If You Know Where You’re Going

When you see success as a journey, you’ll never have the problem of trying to “arrive” at an elusive final destination.

To get a better handle on the 3 things successful people do, let’s take a look at each one of them:

Knowing Your Purpose

Each of us has a purpose for which we were created. Our responsibility—and our greatest joy—is to identify it.  Why were you created?  Think about your unique mix of abilities, the resources available to you, your personal history, and the opportunities around you.

Growing to Your Potential

The only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have been and what we have become. In other words, success comes as the result of growing to our potential.  Here are four principles to put you on the road to growing toward your potential:

1. Concentrate on one main goal. Reaching your potential requires focus.
2. Concentrate on continual improvement. Someone once said of Sam Walton, “There’s never been a day in his life, since I’ve known him, that he didn’t improve in some way.”
3. Forget the past.
4. Focus on the future.

Sowing Seeds That Benefit Others

Without that aspect, the journey can be a lonely and shallow experience. It’s been said that we make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give. Consider what physician, theologian, and philosopher Albert Schweitzer said:

KNOWING YOUR PURPOSE

Where Would You Like to Go?

We make time and set aside money for the things that are most important to us.

Auto industry pioneer and visionary Henry Ford asserted, “The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what it is one’s destiny to do, and then do it.”

A dream does the following for us:

• Gives Us Direction
• Increases Our Potential
• Helps Us Prioritize: A person who has a dream knows what she or he is willing to give up in order to go up.
• Adds Value to Our Work

Vince Lombardi stated, “I firmly believe that any man’s finest hour—his greatest fulfillment to all he holds dear—is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle—victorious.”

Here are the stages for developing a dream:

1. I Thought It
2. I Caught It
3. I Sought It (An old Italian proverb says, “Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.” It takes hunger, tenacity, and commitment to see a dream through until it becomes reality.)
4. A Few Shot It (As corporate leadership expert, management consultant, and friend Bobb Biehl says, “Dreams are like soap bubbles floating close to jagged rocks on a windy day.”)
5. I Got It
6. Some Others Fought It
7. I Taught It (Any dream worth living is worth sharing with others.)
8. Others Bought It

A dream will provide you with a reason to go, a path to follow, and a target to hit.

Henry Ford said, “Before anything else, getting ready is the secret of success.”

 

How Far Can You Go?

Your Attitude Determines Your Altitude

We put people on the moon because we believed we could do it. In the blink of an eye, John F. Kennedy’s speech took the idea of a lunar landing from an impossible dream to an obtainable target.  A moon landing became a reality because of a change in attitude. When our attitudes outdistance our abilities, even the impossible becomes possible.

 

Who and Where You Are Today Result from Your Attitude

• Your Current Attitude Is a Choice: Most people with bad attitudes usually point to something other than themselves to explain their problems.
• Your Attitude Determines How You Approach the Journey
• The Better Your Attitude Is, the Farther You Will Go: A Fortune 500 study found that 94 percent of all the executives surveyed attributed their success more to attitude than any other factor.  Don B. Owens Jr. stated, “Many people fail in life because they believe in the adage: If you don’t succeed, try something else. But success eludes those who follow such advice . . . The dreams that have come true did so because people stuck to their ambitions. They refused to be discouraged. They never let disappointment get the upper hand. Challenges only spurred them on to greater effort.”
• Your Attitude Means the Difference Between Success and Failure: As former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden said, “Things turn out the best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.”

Charles “Tremendous” Jones said that the only difference between who you are today and the person you will be in five years will come from the books you read and the people you associate with.

Dr. William Glasser maintained, “If you want to change attitudes, start with a change in behavior. In other words, begin to act the part, as well as you can, of the person you would rather be, the person you most want to become. Gradually, the old, fearful person will fade away.”  If you wait until you feel like it to try to change your attitude, you will never change. You have to act yourself into changing.  According to Henry Ford, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t—you are right.”

 

How Do You Get There from Here?

Most people give more time to planning their vacations than they do to planning their lives

The main thing is to be constantly moving toward your destination. And setting goals is the best way to make sure that continues to happen.

 

Goals Draw Out Your Sense of Purpose

Fifty percent don’t pay any attention to where they are going; forty percent are undecided and will go in any direction. Only ten percent know what they want, and even all of them don’t go toward it.

Paul Myer commented, “No one ever accomplishes anything of consequence without a goal… Goal setting is the strongest human force for self-motivation.”

Follow this ROAD MAP:

• Recognize Your Dream
• Observe Your Starting Place: As Eric Hoffer, known as the “longshoreman philosopher,” said, “To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.”
• Articulate a Statement of Purpose: Management expert Bob Buford said, “My life mission is: To transform the latent energy in American Christianity into active energy.”  Your purpose statement should naturally grow out of your dreams, values, and convictions. So creating it isn’t a quick, onetime event. Instead, most people develop and then refine it over the course of a couple of years.
• Define Your Goals: To be legitimate, a goal must be within your power to achieve or accomplish personally.  A goal has been called a dream with a deadline.

 

• Move into Action: German poet and novelist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said, “Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one’s thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.” According to Gregg Harris, two-thirds of people surveyed (sixty-seven of one hundred) set goals for themselves. But of those sixty-seven, only ten have made realistic plans to reach their goals. And out of those ten, only two follow through and actually make them happen.
• Adjust Your Plans: In some cases, you’ll simply fail. But as President Abraham Lincoln said, “My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.”
• Point to Success and Celebrate

 

GROWING TO YOUR MAXIMUM POTENTIAL

What Should You Pack in Your Suitcase?

As the old Irish proverb says, “You’ve got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather is.”

Author Gail Sheehy asserted, “If we don’t change, we don’t grow. If we don’t grow, we are not really living. Growth demands a temporary surrender of security. It may mean a giving up of familiar but limiting patterns, safe but unrewarding work, values no longer believed in, relationships that have lost their meaning.”

Most people fight against change, especially when it affects them personally.

Here are ten principles that will help you develop into a person dedicated to personal growth:

1. Choose a Life of Growth
2. Start Growing Today: Napoleon Hill said, “It’s not what you are going to do, but it’s what you are doing now that counts.” Many unsuccessful people have “someday sickness” because they could do some things to bring value to their lives right now. But they put them off and say they’ll do them someday. Their motto is “one of these days.” But as the old English proverb says, “One of these days means none of these days.”
3. Be Teachable: John Wooden once said, “It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.” Wooden recognized that the greatest obstacle to growth isn’t ignorance: it’s knowledge.
4. Focus on Self-Development, Not Self-Fulfillment
5. Never Stay Satisfied with Current Accomplishments: Rick Warren says, “The greatest enemy of tomorrow’s success is today’s success.” Charles Handy remarked, “It is one of the paradoxes of success that the things and ways which got you there are seldom those things that keep you there.”
6. Be a Continual Learner
7. Concentrate on a Few Major Themes
8. Develop a Plan for Growth
9. Pay the Price: Success takes effort, and you can’t make the journey if you’re sitting back waiting for life to come along and improve you.
10. Find a Way to Apply What You Learn: Jim Rohn urged, “Don’t let your learning lead to knowledge. Let your learning lead to action.”

True success always includes others. Find a mentor. Name the person you know who is growing and who has the most expertise in the area where you’d most like to grow. Your goal is to develop a win-win relationship with that person.

 

How Do You Handle the Detours?

Isabel Moore aptly stated, “Life is a one-way street. No matter how many detours you take, none of them leads back. And once you know and accept that, life becomes much simpler.” One of the major keys to success is to keep moving forward on the journey, making the best of the detours and interruptions, turning adversity into advantage.

Two of the greatest detours are fear and failure.  Fear breeds inaction; Inaction leads to lack of experience; Lack of experience fosters ignorance; and Ignorance breeds fear.

A study conducted by the University of Michigan showed the following:

• 60 percent of our fears are totally unwarranted; they never come to pass.
• 20 percent of our fears are focused on our past, which is completely out of our control.
• 10 percent of our fears are based on things so petty that they make no difference in our lives.
• Of the remaining 10 percent, only 4 to 5 percent could be considered justifiable. These statistics show that any time or energy you give to fear is totally wasted and counterproductive 95 percent of the time.

Dr. Susan Jeffries admitted, “As long as I continue to stretch my capabilities, as long as I continue to take risks in making my dreams come true, I am going to experience fear.”

As you move forward on the success journey, you need to remember that what happens in you is more important than what happens to you.

The irony is that the successful person who keeps growing, taking risks, and moving forward feels the same feelings of fear as the one who allows fear to stop him. The difference comes because one doesn’t let fear dominate, while the other does.

The real issue is not whether you’re going to fail. It’s whether you’re going to fail successfully (profiting from your failure) or allow failure to send you on a permanent detour. As Nelson Boswell observed, “The difference between greatness and mediocrity is often how an individual views mistakes.”

Leadership expert Warren Bennis interviewed seventy of the nation’s top performers in various fields and found that none of them viewed his mistakes as failures. When talking about them, they referred to their “learning experiences,” “tuition paid,” “detours,” and “opportunities for growth.”  Depending on your attitude toward it, failure can either bog you down or help you along on your journey.

Bobb Biehl suggests the following questions to help you analyze any failure:

• What lessons have I learned?
• Am I grateful for this experience?
• How can I turn the failure into success?
• Practically speaking, where do I go from here?
• Who else has failed in this way before, and how can that person help me?
• How can my experience help others someday to keep from failing?
• Did I fail because of another person, because of my situation, or because of myself?
• Did I actually fail, or did I fall short of an unrealistically high standard?
• Where did I succeed as well as fail?

Dr. Ronald Niednagel said, “Failure isn’t failure unless you don’t learn from it.” Kemp and Claflin wrote, “Carnegie rose to fame as one of the most effective trainers of speakers and one of the best-selling authors of all time. Two keys enabled him to turn failure into success: his unwillingness to be stopped by failure, and his willingness to learn from failure.”

View your errors the way Henry Ford did his. He said, “Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”

Here’s the cycle of Fear:

Fear > Inaction > Lack of Experience > Ignorance > Increased Fear

 

But look what happens when you replace inaction with action:

Fear > Action > Experience > Wisdom > Decreased Fear and Increased Success

 

Are We There Yet?

Put another way, you could say that for everything you gain, you pay something.

Here are the trade-offs required to keep moving to a higher level during the success journey:

• Achievement over Affirmation: Affirmation from others is fickle and fleeting. If you want to make an impact during your lifetime, you have to trade the praise you could receive from others for the things of value that you can accomplish.
• Excellence over Acceptability: Chuck Swindoll, chancellor of Dallas Theological Seminary, noted, “Competitive excellence requires 100 percent all of the time. If you doubt that, try maintaining excellence by setting your standards at 92 percent. Or even 95 percent. People figure they’re doing fine so long as they get somewhere near it. Excellence gets reduced to acceptable, and before long, acceptable doesn’t seem worth the sweat if you can get by with adequate. After that, mediocrity is only a breath away.”  Pat Riley said, “Excellence is the gradual result of always striving to do better.”
• Future Potential over Financial Gain: Each time you relinquish the possibility of financial gain for an opportunity at future potential, you’ll pass another major landmark on the success journey. Money often brings options, but it doesn’t necessarily add value to your life.
• A Narrow Focus over Scattered Interests: People with an I-don’t-do-that-kind-of-work attitude who haven’t paid their dues don’t go very far. Being able to focus your attention almost exclusively on what you do best is a privilege you earn, not a right.
• Significance over Security: Bob Buford talks about the landmark ability of shifting your attention to significance in his book Halftime.  “The first half of life has to do with getting and gaining, learning and earning… The second half is more risky because it has to do with living beyond the immediate.” David Jeremiah says, “You have to give up to go up.” And the people who want to move forward without making any sacrifices get stuck at the crossroads and never go any farther on the success journey.
• Develop Character: Robert A. Cook declared, “There is no substitute for character. You can buy brains, but you cannot buy character.”

President Harry Truman said, “In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves. Self-discipline with all of them came first.”

 

SOWING SEEDS THAT BENEFIT OTHERS

Is It a Family Trip?

As much as parents love their children, every day many of them walk away from their families in the pursuit of success.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, families dissolve at a greater rate in the United States than in any other major industrialized country? And we also lead in the number of fathers absent from the home. U.S. divorce laws are the most permissive in the world, and people are using them at an alarming rate. To some people, marriages and families have become acceptable casualties in the pursuit of success.

Josh McDowell wisely stated, “The greatest thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.”

Dr. Alfred Kinsey, who studied six thousand marriages and three thousand divorces, revealed that “there may be nothing more important in a marriage than a determination that it shall persist. With such a determination, individuals force themselves to adjust and to accept situations which would seem sufficient grounds for a breakup, if continuation of the marriage were not the prime objective.” If you want to help your spouse, your children, and yourself, then become committed to building and sustaining a strong marriage.

To build a strong family, you have to make your home a supportive environment. Psychologist William James observed, “In every person from the cradle to the grave, there is a deep craving to be appreciated.”

For every negative remark to a family member, it takes four positive statements to counteract the damage. That’s why it’s so important to focus on the positive aspects of each other’s personality and express unconditional love for each other, both verbally and nonverbally. Then the home becomes a positive environment for everyone.

When you feel loved and supported by your family, you can weather nearly any crisis. And you can truly enjoy success. An article in the Dallas Morning News reported that the average couple married ten years or more spends only thirty-seven minutes a week in meaningful communication.

 

Who Else Should You Take?

Maxwell says, “Over time I’ve learned this meaningful lesson: The people closest to me determine my level of success or failure.”  He goes on to explain that he looks for these ten things in a potential leader:

1. Make Things Happen (Millionaire philanthropist Andrew Carnegie said, “As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.”)
2. See and Seize Opportunities.
3. Influence Others. (When you think about it, all leaders have two things in common: they’re going somewhere, and they’re able to persuade others to go with them.)
4. Add Value.
5. Attract Other Leaders. (Look for leaders who attract other leaders, as they will be able to multiply your success.  You can only lead people whose leadership ability is less than or equal to your own. To keep attracting better and better leaders, you will have to keep developing your leadership ability.)
6. Equip Others. (As Harvey Firestone said, “It is only as we develop others that we permanently succeed.”)
7. Provide Inspiring Ideas. (Nineteenth-century author-playwright Victor Hugo observed, “There’s nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”)
8. Possess Uncommonly Positive Attitudes
9. Live Up to Their Commitments
10. Have Loyalty. (Loyal people always paint a positive picture of you with others. They may take you to task privately or hold you accountable, but they never criticize you to others.)

 

What Should We Do Along the Way?

To really be successful, you need to take somebody with you across the finish line.

Virginia Arcastle commented, “When people are made to feel secure and important and appreciated, it will no longer be necessary for them to whittle down others in order to seem bigger in comparison.” That’s what insecure people tend to do—make themselves look better at others’ expense.

Cullen Hightower remarked, “A true measure of your worth includes all the benefits others have gained from your success.”

Charles Schwab said, “I have yet to find the man, however exalted his station, who did not do better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than under a spirit of criticism.”

People buy in to the person before buying in to their leadership.

Make people development your top priority, and let them fly with you for a while.  Never work alone. That sounds too simple, but it is truly the secret to developing others.

Here’s Maxwell’s suggested process for delegation:

• I do it. First, I learn to do the job. Understand the why as well as the how, and try to perfect my craft.
• I do it—and you watch. I demonstrate it while you observe, and during the process, I explain what I’m doing and why.
• You do it—and I watch. As soon as possible, we exchange roles. I give you permission and authority to take over the job, but I stay with you to offer advice, correction, and encouragement.
• You do it. Once you’re proficient, I step back and let you work alone. The learner is drawn up to a higher level. And as soon as he is on that higher level, the teacher is free to move on to higher things.

As you develop people, remember that you are taking them on the success journey with you, not sending them. Stay with them until they’re ready to fly. And when they are ready, get them on their way.

May you follow this road map to change your life and regularly practice the 3 Things Successful Do, as you shoot for the stars!