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A Success Recipe

by

Steve Gillman

Are you ready for a simple recipe for success? The ingredients include motivation, knowledge, advice from those who have succeeded, and imitation of successful thoughts and actions. These are the proportions:

One part knowledge.

One part self awareness.

A pinch of success advice.

Ten parts emulation of success.

Mix your knowledge and self awareness into your emulation of the thoughts and behaviors of the successful. Sprinkle lightly with advice from those who have succeeded before you. Heat this mix with your own motivation. Cook for several months or decades, until done, and then repeat the process.

Knowledge

This part of the success recipe should be obvious, but then many people look for shortcuts here. You can’t study stocks for a few days and know enough to consistently beat the market. You can’t pick up a pen for the first time and write a best-selling novel. Do your homework.

Success Advice

It might seem like a great idea to ask for advice from those who are successful. It might even work – if you are lucky. The problem is that many successful people are too busy being successful to really study and understand how they got that way. I watched a 100-year-old man explain that smoking a big cigar every day was one of the secrets of his longevity. It would be nice to know why he has lived so long, but we won’t necessarily learn by asking him, will we?

Listen to what successful people say. They have countless valuable lessons to teach you. Just be careful in picking the true lessons out of the opinions, idealizations and ego reports.

Emulation Of Success

This is the most important ingredient in this success recipe. Rather than doing what successful people say, do what they do. This is how you can really learn success. Naturally you have to look closely and apply a little brainpower to see what they are really doing that is causing their success.

A real estate investor who made a lot more money than I told me he didn’t believe in setting goals. However, as I watched him and listened to him, I realized that he knew just where he expected to be with his projects in six months. This was goal-setting. He just called the process something else.

Read between the lines when hearing advice. Listen for insight into how the person thinks, and how she approaches her challenges. The advice of a successful basketball player may be just to practice more, but suppose he casually mentions “I saw that going in,” after a great shot. Perhaps it’s time to start visualizing your shots going in.

Sometimes you can’t quite get what is causing a person’s success. When I first tried to exchange links with other websites, the owners didn’t respond to my emails. Then I found a simple email a successful internet marketer used to get links. It sounded so silly to me that I wanted to change it, but I tried it anyhow. It worked – repeatedly.

It’s more important to do the right things than to understand why they are the right things. To understand is great, but at first, it is often best to just copy many of the actions, attitudes and approaches of someone who is succeeding. Model success, even before you understand it.

Self Awareness And Motivation

Of course, there are the very real parts of your personality that have to be considered. I know a car salesman who gets away with hugging his new customers. They seem to respond positively. If I tried that, I would be acting out of character, and the uncomfortable situation wouldn’t be likely to help sales.

We are all different. You have to adapt what you learn to your own personality. However, you have to do this without using your own uniqueness as an excuse for not doing what is necessary. Excuses can be very subtle. This is where self awareness becomes so important.

We are also all motivated differently. A successful man who is motivated by the desire to escape poverty and have security is not operating the same way as one who gets rich chasing after dreams of boats and expensive homes. One of them will be more useful to you, depending on how you are motivated. This is just another example of where self awareness comes into the recipe. Learn the mental mechanics of your own motivations. It is an important part of this success recipe.

Steve Gillman writes on many topics including brainpower, weight loss, meditation, habits of mind, creative problem solving, generating luck and anything related to self improvement. Learn more and get FREE e-courses at

SelfImprovementNow.com

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A Success Recipe