DON’S 5 STEPS TO RAPID SUCCESS:

Here are 5 steps that I feel will allow you to accelerate your particular level of success in any arena. There are many paths that lead to success but these 5 steps are a rapid path, one that will allow you to notice results almost immediately. The odd thing about these 5 steps is that most people especially intelligent and creative people tend to go at things in the opposite order of this list. I honestly feel that sometimes your own intelligence can be your worst enemy, and there is a reason why the world is ran by people of average intelligence, for example our current president. They are simply smart enough to understand how the wheel works and why we need it, but not intelligent and creative enough to feel that they need to recreate it. Anyway here are my 5 steps to accelerated success:

1. Observe, study and imitate the best, until you are getting consistent positive results:

The first thing you want to do is identify the field you wish to be successful in and get a well reviewed and highly rated book dealing with that field and read it. Next identify those who are successful in the field you wish to succeed in and then watch them closely. Don’t question why they do what they do at this point. Just study them! How do they dress, how do they carry them selves, how do they speak, and then copy it. Look for common threads of behaviors amongst multiple successful people in the field. There are certain things you cannot imitate, such as raw talent and experience and expertise but at this point you are simply learning how to put forth the superficial image of success, and this alone will open more doors than you can imagine. This is what a con man does and con is short for confidence, but it is ultimately competence that you are after. So please don’t confuse confidence with competence. It is during this process that you will begin to identify possible mentors. Make sure you are not too overly overt in your imitation of other people; for this will have the opposite effect.

2. Rationalize your behavior through self examination :

In step one you imitated with out questioning until you began to personify the image and actions of success, in this step you want to start making more detailed decisions. You want to start to question why the successful people you are studying do what they do and why they act how they act. In other words start to understand the actions of the successful people around you. Most successful people do everything for a reason! Work to understanding what those reasons are and what value they are attaching to what they are doing, this is extremely important. This will allow you to understand not only the behaviors and actions you are imitating, but also it will allow you to clearly understand how these successful behaviors and actions benefit you in different situations. It is important that you practice self examination during this step so you know why certain things work and why others don’t. Success is counter intuitive, so if you continue to act with out rational thought you will continue to make the same mistakes again and again and again. So it is important that you associate positive and negative values to your actions. For example most people have a fear of public speaking but once you realize that the benefits of public speaking far out weigh the possible negatives, you will rationalize that it is to your benefit to develop your public speaking skills. Another example is that most people feel that to win an argument they need to keep talking back and forth and pushing their point of view until the other person gives in. Through self examination I have learned that the most powerful tool a person has at his disposal when arguing with another person is a long hard pause, I know it is counter intuitive to think that silence is the best way to win a war of words but it is. This is just an example of how rational examination of your behavior, not intuitive / emotional reactions, will lead to rapid success.

Note: There are times to utilize your intuition so do not totally abandon your spidey senses!

3. Create a Value System: Learn to attach higher and lower ranking to the way you behave based upon positive and negative results:

During the process of self examination you should be attaching positive and negative values to your behaviors. You need to observe why some things work while other things don’t. When you are imitating another successful person you will be absorbing and taking in a lot of information, it is important that you use the process of self examination to rank this information or else you will not know what to do with it. It is important that you assign the behavior that gives you positive results a high value and that you internalize that behavior. If you have certain behaviors that are holding you back identify them and give them a low ranking with in your internalized value system or better yet get rid of them. It is important that you do this, cause if you don’t you will be in autopilot and you will do what intuitively makes sense to you which will usually lead to bad results. One example is most men think that the way to attract beautiful women is to be super nice and shower her with compliments and gifts. You would think this would make sense, but beautiful women are attracted to the opposite, slightly cocky / overtly confident men, who communicate a strong sense of self and non – neediness the last thing you want to do is give a beautiful woman a feeling that you are seeking her approval and that’s what gifts, compliments and being a super nice guy communicates. This is another example of how many times behavior that intuitively makes sense leads to negative results, which leads to frustration. So in the process of examining how the world reacts to your behavior make sure you are assigning value to your behavior. This is critical!!

4. Take the new behavior, skills and information that you have learned and tweak it as to create new variations:

Once you are getting consistent results, make the necessary modifications to the acquired behaviors so that they are congruent with who you are as a person. Basically take the information that you have learned and improve on it, in other words take it to the next level. A good example of this is sports; most successful players watch and study the successful players of the past and model their game after them. But after they have mastered the particular player’s moves and style of play they begin to take it to the next level, thus creating a new standard of success for future players. It is important that you don’t modify the acquired skills / information to the point that it is no longer effective, modify with in reason. We have all seen examples of very talented people who are ineffective because they put too much of their own personal twist on it. Moderation is key ask Jason Williams of the Miami Heat.

5. Come up with your own ideas and behaviors – innovate!

I feel that for some reason human beings are wired to do this first. Especially highly intelligent people tend to want to recreate the wheel and feel as if they are insulting their intelligence by imitating others. This in my opinion has been the down fall of many intelligent people. Most smart people are quick to tell you “that’s not how I would do it” or “I would of done that totally different”. It is the reason they are bored in school! The reason why they fail so often is that they are not building on past success and instead are struggling to create an original way of approaching situations. Now I am not knocking originality in the least bit and if you are one of the few people out of billions that can consistently introduce new successful way of doing things then go for it. But most inventors will tell you that they didn't achieve success until after they had failed a thousand times. By watching, imitating and understanding successful people you get to skip the thousands of failures and only accumulate the information that is of value. Now that you have a successful blueprint to fall back on, be as creative as you want. Innovate as many new ways of behaving as you wish, while using the successful behavior as a gauge. And don’t forget to always portray yourself in positive light and to think positive at all times! If you follow these five steps you will start to notice that incredible opportunities will start falling into your lap.

Final note:

There is no such thing as luck. What most label as luck is really a combination of expertise, experience, solid mentors and access to great information!

• Expertise is truly understanding the knowledge.
• Experience is having done it successfully.
• A solid mentor is some one who is successful in your field that is years ahead of you and has taken a personal interest in seeing you succeed.
• Having access to great information means knowing where to get top notch info when you need it. Most people think they need to personally know everything especially highly intelligent people. More important then knowing the information is knowing how to get it and where to get it from when you need it.

Okay I am done purging my thoughts for the day! I hope you find these words helpful.