Everyone who has studied the lives of successful people has drawn their own conclusions about the most important traits or ingredients of success. Clearly we can’t settle on a single seasoning, but people usually look for the most important ingredient, and that’s where they tend to disagree.
For Gallup, the most important trait found among top-tier entrepreneurs was the ability to take risks, followed by focus.
For Daniel Goleman, the trait with the biggest influence on a person’s success was cognitive control, which covers impulse control, managing negative emotions and being able to give up immediate gratification for a long-term goal.
For Paul Tough, it was a personality trait: conscientiousness, meaning the precision and care someone puts into doing or checking things when carrying out their tasks. Its synonyms would include diligence, care, dedication, accuracy, neatness and precision.
Meanwhile, for psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth, it was grit. She said that grit and self-discipline were much stronger, and predicted a person’s success far better than IQ.
But for Tony Robbins, there is one type of person who could crush everyone with the traits listed above: the hungry person. And we don’t mean hunger in the literal sense; if we did, anyone on a diet would be bound to succeed.
Robbins says that throughout all the time he has worked as a “coach” to entrepreneurs and billionaires, the most striking difference between people who succeed and people who fail lies in their hunger.
You must be hungry and never lose that hunger.
Hunger to grow, hunger to contribute, hunger to learn, to struggle, to fight, hunger to succeed, and never to be satisfied, because once you are satisfied, complacency sets in, and complacency is the first sign of failure.
Hunger matters more than intelligence. In Robbins’s view, nothing can stop a person who is hungry enough.
Hungry people are people who will be willing to do whatever it takes to reach their goals.
The hungry person was perfectly portrayed on screen by Al Pacino as Tony Montana in Scarface. Montana came from extreme poverty, and his hunger for success let him do whatever was necessary to reach the top of the criminal organisation. He also perfectly showed what happens when power clouds your judgement: he even forgot that bullets could kill Tony Montana.
It’s not a good example, but that same hunger is found in legitimate businesses too.
Tony Robbins urges us not to misunderstand that hunger, though. You can succeed by crushing people, but if you really want to reach the top and stay there, you must constantly look for ways to keep helping people.
Robbins’s mentor, none other than the great entrepreneur and motivational speaker Jim Rohn, made that lesson very clear to him. Rohn told him that you must always be adding value to the people around you: help them succeed and make money, and use your resources and skills to turn them into successful people. That way, your own success will be much greater too.
Further reading
- I went from poor to rich thanks to these 4 habits
- 7 incredible ways to make your first million
- If you’re going to fail, this is the way to do it
Featured image: Andrea Ricca, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr.
