When we compare a successful person with someone who hasn’t succeeded, the difference almost certainly comes down to the fact that the successful person did some things the other one didn’t.
That is what separates the few from the crowd. Angel and Marc, the authors of Marcandangel.com, have something to say about this. They say they have had the privilege of working with dozens of extremely successful people, and the first thing they noticed that set them apart from everyone else was unshakeable self-discipline.
Everyone dreams and everyone wants to stand out, but most people end up putting things off, while a few repeat a series of steps that the crowd would probably consider unconventional.
Unconventional steps successful people take in life
1. They dream like everyone else, but they stay awake
As someone once said, success belongs to those who dream but, when the time comes, know how to stay awake.
Everything starts with a dream, but if all you do is dream, you may be in trouble. In a way, dreaming means being positive, because there is nothing sadder than a person without dreams. Of course, living in a fantasy world won’t help you reach your goals.
Big fantasies, wishes and dreams send a message to the brain that reaching those goals is possible. But if we never take action, it’s the brain itself that invites us to procrastinate, because, after all, we have built ourselves a fantasy world.
It works the same way for everything. Do you dream of losing weight? You have probably already pictured yourself slimmer. It can be done, and you know it, but you will have to take action to get there; you know that too. Step by step, gram by gram.
Do you want to succeed in your career or in business?
Step by step, but start walking. In short, dreaming is positive, but on its own it leads nowhere. The people who achieve their dreams are the ones who take action to make them come true.
2. Be ultra-specific about your dreams
Take your dream and crystallise it. In other words, make it concrete. A while ago we wrote about the steps to reach our goals, where we said that goals should be specific, realistic, measurable and have a set date.
For example: “My dream is to earn more money.” That won’t get you anywhere. You need to be more specific. How much money do you want to earn, and how soon would you like to achieve it? We draw up a plan to get there and take action. Now you have a specific dream.
Put another way, successful people plan so they don’t leave their dreams to chance. As someone once said: “Failing to plan is planning to fail.”
(Read: This trait predicts success far better than IQ)
3. They picture the obstacles ahead of time
Some people say they prefer to learn from mistakes as they come. But the truth is that it’s much smarter to anticipate where the obstacles that could stop us from reaching our goals will be.
Take New Year’s resolutions as an example. Most people make them with enthusiasm, but few are aware of the reasons why they will probably end up breaking them. And so they won’t be on the lookout to stop that from happening.
Some people think this sounds like a mental contradiction, because the endless “think positive” message turns into a fallacy when a person runs into an obstacle they didn’t count on. That’s why you need to “think realistic”. Picturing obstacles before they arrive is very positive, because it’s the only way to have a strategy ready to overcome them. And that really is smart motivation.
To succeed in reaching our goals, we need to know what could go wrong, because many ambitious people end up failing in business for reasons that were very easy to prevent.
On SEAL missions, they say they spend much more time preparing for every scenario that could go wrong. That way, they already have all the backup plans in mind.
4. Self-inquiry to build actionable answers
This is an excellent idea from Marc. It’s a useful kind of mental contrast that makes our dreams collide with reality. In other words, we are going to test and question our dreams to see how we could make them happen in real life.
That is, we are going to ask our goal: “How?”
For example: I’m going to lose weight.
Can I lose weight? How can I lose weight? These questions will lead us to plan and carry out our plans. Questioning our dreams helps us develop action plans, and those plans help us be more productive and more grounded in reality.
In the end, successful people succeed because they take action, carry out plans and take the necessary steps when the time comes, and they do it more easily because they had already planned for it. All this may sound too simplistic, but the fact is that most of us are prepared for the complex and end up failing at the simplest things.
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