Editor’s note: This article was first published in April 2016. Warren Buffett is described as being in his eighties and spending 80% of his working time reading; that figure comes from his own interviews and is approximate, and he was 85 in 2016.
Every skill can be learned. Even if you don’t know how to play football or tennis, with practice you may never become the best tennis player in the world, or even make it into the top 100 in your country, but there is no doubt that, in time, you will be a better player than you are today.
The same goes for everything else, success included. As T. Harv Eker put it in his famous book Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, even success is a skill that can be learned. All it takes is setting a few key habits and making some small changes, just as you would if you wanted to get in shape or improve your skills at work.
We have discussed this subject several times and from different angles, so today we set out what we consider the top 5 changes we should make in our lives. It is no harder than learning any other skill, but it requires exactly the same thing: stepping out of our comfort zone and starting to do things we haven’t done before, so that we get results we haven’t achieved before.
1. Your circle of friends: bring in different kinds of people.
Some time ago I published an article on the importance of the people you surround yourself with, with a personal anecdote or two. We tend to surround ourselves with people who are like us, and that leads us to share the thoughts, values, ideals and goals of our group of friends.
Remember that we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. Andrew Carnegie went as far as saying that he became the richest man in the world thanks to what he called the “master mind”, a concept that consisted of surrounding himself with other talented, intelligent and creative people. Surrounding yourself with people smarter than you.
According to various studies, a person’s “net worth” (the wealth they have built up) has been found to have a lot to do with the level of their closest friends.
In other words, someone who surrounds themselves with business owners, investors or millionaires will, statistically, be far more successful than someone who only spends time with alcoholics and/or potheads.
And it is not only about the quality of the people, but also about differences in thinking. Someone who doesn’t know what they want from life often surrounds themselves with people who have little ambition and few goals.
If we bring people who think differently into our circle, they can offer us other points of view, and we can offer them ours.
Finally, if you manage to include in your circle people you admire, or people who have already achieved what you want to achieve, the likelihood of improving your life will increase exponentially.
2. Improve your network: learn social skills.
Closely linked to the previous point: success sometimes depends not on how good you are but on who you know. When we talked about the 50-30-20 rule, we made it very clear that hard work alone won’t help you climb the company ladder. Even if you are the best worker in the company, if your boss has never heard of you, you will get nowhere.
The best jobs are not posted on job boards. They come through someone you know, professionally or personally, and the same goes for business opportunities. So the more people you know, and the higher their calibre within your field, the better your chances of success.
(See: 8 ways to influence people, according to Robert Cialdini, author of Influence)
3. Make reading a habit.
Successful people are avid readers. Everyone else tends to watch television. And as we have written before, the problem may be even more serious: “Why watching television can literally ruin your life“.
There are only two shortcuts for speeding up our learning and opening our minds: a mentor or a book. We could be talking about books on personal finance, investing, or biographies of successful people.
Some people think learning ends when they finish school or university, when the truth is that we should never stop learning and training. Even Warren Buffett, in his eighties, says he spends 80% of his working time immersed in reading.
4. Do the hard or uncomfortable things.
You’ll have to make that call you are so afraid of making. (Read: Billy Joel’s piano man: the importance of taking more risks.) You’ll have to get up earlier than you would really like. You have to give more of yourself without expecting anything in the short term. And so on, up to 16 hard things you will have to do to achieve success.
If you want to succeed, improve your life or achieve something big, you will have to get used to the uncertainty of not knowing what will happen. You will have to accept that there are no rewards without sacrifice, and that the sacrifice always comes before the reward. Easy come, easy go, and the best things in life usually take sacrifice to achieve.
While the middle class and the poor seek comfort and run away from risk, successful people turn risk into their comfort zone, to the point of even needing the uncertainty of an outcome.
Steve Siebold’s advice: make a list of five things you could start doing today that make you uncomfortable but that will help you improve your finances and grow your money in the medium term.
(See: How to build your resilience to failure)
5. Set goals and start taking steps to reach them.
It may sound repetitive by now, but many people don’t get what they want because they don’t know what they want, and nobody reaches the place they wanted to go if they never knew where that was.
That said, talks whose message is to visualise the goal and want it badly enough have become fashionable. When someone fails, they are told it is because they didn’t want it enough. Well, I want to sleep with Jennifer Lopez (to give an example), and I want it badly enough.
But if I want to achieve that goal, my desire and enthusiasm are not enough. The first step would have to be getting in touch with Jennifer Lopez.
In the end, any goal requires the same steps:
- We set a goal.
- If it is too ambitious, we break it down into smaller objectives.
- We draw up a plan to achieve those objectives.
- We start taking steps that bring us closer to the goal.
- We are persistent.
- We prepare for difficulties, stumbles and failures.
- We stay persistent and keep fighting for that goal.
If you want to lose weight, you are going to have to sweat. You won’t find any formula that works without sacrifice and sweat. The same is true of every other goal we set ourselves in life.
Featured image: Dr. Marcus Gossler, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
