Many authors have written about the series of steps the world’s richest men took from their earliest days, and they nearly all agree on the same points. There is also a common message: “There are no shortcuts to success.” That saying isn’t entirely true these days, though; I would rather change it to: “As soon as you see a shortcut to success, take it.”
But I’m not going to use the word “shortcut”. Instead, let’s talk about success accelerators.
Some famous authors, such as Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich, relied to some extent on a psychological or spiritual side, often using the words “desire” and “faith”. Those are words I’m not sure I buy.
It’s true that we must want something badly, and it’s true that we must have faith that we will achieve it. But it’s even truer that the lazy, and even the motivated fool, can have desire and faith too.
In other words, I can wish with all my might to be the next entrepreneur of the century, and I can even have the faith and total conviction that I will make it, without letting anyone tell me I won’t. But if it all stays at faith and desire, and I stay on the sofa drinking beer, playing video games and watching TV, desire and faith are seasonings that count for nothing.
So these would be the most important steps to success. Without them, desire would remain just a dream that, 20 years later, still hasn’t come true.
1. Decide, and stop procrastinating.
Procrastination is the great enemy of success. Wanting to do something and putting it off until it suits us is usually the ingredient found in most stories… not of failure, because those people never tried anything, but, let’s say, of a great absence of goals, and therefore a lack of success.
What successful people have in common is that they are decisive and tend to make decisions very quickly. But careful: they are not madmen who do whatever pops into their heads without thinking it through, and yet they don’t wait until they are 100% sure either. They know they may fail, but they also know they may succeed.
In fact, Richard Branson’s favourite motto is “Screw it, let’s do it.” Without decision there is nothing. Or, put another way:
Sometimes the steps we don’t take have greater consequences for our lives than the steps we do take.
Decisions we fail to make also bring dire consequences for our lives, especially when it comes to business and our personal lives. You need to tell the difference between taking action and simply being in motion.
2. Acquire knowledge, and specialise.
Knowledge and preparation are everything, but as you can see, I have put them second, because being decisive matters more: however much you study and prepare, in the end the knowledge you need is learned along the way.
There’s an old saying: experience is what you get just after you needed it.
Even so, if you want to write a book, you’ll first have to read books. There’s no shortcut here. Likewise, if you want to get started in business, you’ll need to know about the product or service you want to sell, and yes, something about business too.
As for specialisation, the truth is that an entrepreneur ends up with an average knowledge of many subjects, but their success will come from specialising in something specific.
(See: 9 business books every professional should read this summer)
It’s said that you have to be the best in your industry to succeed in business ahead of the competition. That isn’t entirely true either, because sometimes a bad product with good marketing goes down much better with users. In other words, there are industry experts with the best product whom potential customers have never heard of.
Never stop acquiring new knowledge related to your business or profession. Never let yourself fall behind.
Remember that all highly successful people have one thing in common: they are voracious readers.
(Read: 6 reading techniques that will change the way you read forever)
3. Planning.
You need to be prepared and decisive, but as we often say, failing to plan is planning to fail.
Many entrepreneurs start, but very few finish (and few finish well). So we need a plan: we need to have studied the reasons why our business might fail, and act accordingly.
When it’s not about business but about financial goals, a plan is just as necessary, because we need to set goals for saving, for investing and, above all, for growing our capital.
So plan, because “no wind is favourable to a captain who doesn’t know where he is heading” (I don’t know who said that).
(Read: Tony Robbins: the simple secret to wealth)
4. Surround yourself with the best.
Given that we are the average of the people we spend the most time with, the same holds true in business. If you start a company and hire mediocre people, you’ll end up with a mediocre company.
The world’s richest men, who are business people, agree on the importance of working only with the best. Steve Jobs used to say that a company playing in the first division couldn’t afford to let in second-division players.
A hundred brains may have more ideas than one, but just three intelligent, creative brains can bring down a hundred mediocre ones. Look for that kind of person. Always look for people you can learn from. Never be the smartest person in the room.
As Steve Siebold says, if we expose ourselves to people who are more successful than we are, our chances of success rise sharply.
5. Persistence.
You have to keep going no matter what. If you fall, you get up. If you fall again, you get up again, as many times as it takes, because you haven’t failed until you stop trying to succeed.
Most business people have a few failures behind them, and they don’t measure success by the number of failures, but by how you behave once a failure happens.
Most people, once they fail at a venture, get stuck in a loop, a self-destructive cycle, and spend more time lamenting than getting up and starting again. When failure comes into your life, you have only two options: stay stuck or try again.
(Read: How to recover after failing in business)
It’s often said that, in life as in business, things always, without exception, go wrong at some point. You have to be prepared for that, because adversity is sometimes not there to knock you down but to make you smarter and more creative.
Of course, it also does a good job of sorting those made of the tough stuff of success from those who aren’t; it separates the people who give up from those who never admit defeat. In the end, persistence and tenacity become one of the most important ingredients for success.
See also: How to completely turn your life around next year
But above all… enjoy it. Most highly successful people agree that happiness is not found at the finish line but along the journey.
Further reading
Featured image: John Mathew Smith & www.celebrity-photos.com from Laurel Maryland, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
