05/02/2022
WHAT IS SUCCESS?
When people start limiting the amount of success they desire, I assure you they will limit what will be required of them in order to achieve success and will fail miserably at doing what it takes to keep it.
The most crucial things to know about success — in order to have it and keep it — are the following:
1. Success is important.
2. Success is your duty.
3. There is no shortage of success.
Individuals and groups must actively accomplish their goals and targets in order to carry on. If not, they will either cease to exist or be consumed and become part of something else.
Winning — over and over again — at everything in which you involve yourself ensures that you will be able to further expand.
And it guarantees that bout you and your ideas will survive into the feature.
A person who limits his or her potential success will limit what he or she will do to create it and keep it.
Success Is Your Duty
The continued pursuit of success should be approached not as a choice but as an absolute must.
Success must be approached from an ethical viewpoint. Success is your duty, obligation, and responsibility!
There Is No Shortage of Success
Success is something people make. Great ideas, new technologies, innovative products, and fresh solutions to old problems are all things that will never exist in shortages.
Success for anyone or any group is ultimately a positive contribution to all people and all groups as it provides validation of the possibilities to all.
Assume Control for Everything
People who typically succeed are required to take big actions — and it is impossible to take big actions if you don’t take responsibility. It is equally impossible to do something positive when you are spending your time making excuses.
Anyone who uses blame as the reason why something happened or did not happen will never accumulate real success in life and only further his or her status as a slave on this planet.
To get where you want to go in life, you must adopt the view that whatever is going on in your world — good, bad, or nothing — is something caused by you.
Once you start to approach every situation as someone who is acting — not being acted upon — you will start to have more control over your life.
Success must be approached from an ethical viewpoint. Success is your duty, obligation, and responsibility!
Four Degrees of Action
The more action you take, the better your chances are of getting a break. Disciplined, consistent, and persistent actions are more of a determining factor in the creation of success that any other combination of things.
Categories of degrees of actions:
1. Do nothing.
Regardless of which degree of action you operate in, they all require work in their own ways. Signs that you are doing nothing include exhibiting boredom, lethargy, complacency, and lack of purpose. People in this group will fi nd themselves spending their time and energy justifying their situations— which requires as much work as the other actions.
It’s also interesting to note that those who do nothing in one area of their lives will find something they love to do and spend time doing those things—something for which they’ll often take massive action. It could be online poker, gaming, biking, watching movies, reading books.
2. Retreat.
“Retreaters” are those who take actions in reverse—probably in order to avoid negative experiences that they imagine will come as a result of taking action. The retreater personifies the “fear-of-success” phenomenon. He or she has experienced results that were not fruitful (or that he or she did not perceive as fruitful) and has therefore decided to avoid taking further actions that might prompt this to occur again.
Usually retreating only comes about as a result of being told to do so over and over. So many of us are instructed during childhood, “don’t touch that,” “be careful,” “don’t talk to him,” “get away from that,” and so on and then start to adopt retreat as an action.
3. Take normal levels of action.
Unfortunately, a majority of the workforce takes normal degrees of action; it’s those managers, executives, and companies that blend in more than they stand out. Although some members of this group may occasionally attempt to generate exceptional quality, they almost never create anything in exceptional quantities. The goal here is average—average marriages, health, careers, and finances. As long as average works, they are fi ne with it. They don’t cause problems for others or themselves as long as conditions remain steady and predictable.
When you have been taking only normal actions, you are even more susceptible to challenges that are certain to come your way. Any set of ordinary events, financial conditions, or stressful experiences can throw off a lifetime of typically “acceptable” levels of action and result in a serious degree of stress, uncertainty, and hurt.
4. Take massive action.
Massive action is actually the level of action that creates new problems—and until you create problems, you’re not truly operating at the fourth stage of action.
When you are taking massive action, you aren’t thinking in terms of how many hours you work. When you start operating at the fourth degree of action, your mind-set will shift and so will your results. You will end up instigating opportunities that you will have to address earlier, later, and in a different way than you would on a “normal” day, so a routine day will become a thing of the past.
Regardless of which degree of action you operate in, they all require work in their own ways.
Someone who takes average actions but is capable of much more is really electing to do some variation of doing nothing or retreating.
Taking normal action is the most dangerous of the levels, because it is the most accepted by society.
Taking massive action means making somewhat unreasonable choices and then following these up with even more action.
You will know you are stepping into the realm of massive action when you create new problems for yourself and start to receive criticism and warning from others.
Money and power follow attention, so whoever can get the most attention is the person who takes the most action and sooner or later will get the most results.
Making massive action a discipline will break you through obscurity, increase you value to the marketplace, and help you generate success in any area you elect.
Success for anyone or any group is ultimately a positive contribution to all people and all groups as it provides validation of the possibilities to all.
Average Is a Failing Formula
Look around, and chances are you’ll see a world filled with average. Although this is—as I have previously stated—the “acceptable” level of activity upon which the middle class is built, there is a growing amount of evidence that this thinking is unworkable. Jobs are being shipped overseas, and unemployment is becoming even more rampant. Members of the middle class are unable to get their heads above water, people are living longer than their savings, and entire companies and industries are being wiped out as a result of average products, average management, average workers, average actions, and average thinking.
You need to change your commitment and thinking to be far above any concepts of average.
Average never yields anything more than average and usually much less. Average thinking and actions will only guarantee you misery, uncertainty, and failure.
Success isn’t just a “journey,” as countless people and books suggest it is; rather, it’s a state—constant or otherwise—over which you have control and responsibility.
If You’re Not First, You’re Last
