In Success Is a Choice: Make the Choices that Make You Successful, Leadership thought leader and author John C. Maxwell shares fourteen choices for creating a dream life. Success is a choice book is abridged from Maxwell’s New York Times bestselling book, Beyond Talent: Become Someone Who Gets Extraordinary Results.
What we often call “overnight success” is a lot of hard work, sleepless nights, roadwork, training, gym reps, swim laps, and relentless pursuit in the dark that just started paying off. Overnight success usually takes ten years or 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in a particular field or endeavour. We get rewarded publicly for what we diligently practiced, mastered and refined in the dark. Success is often not a straight path; it takes a lot of focus, dedication, perseverance, self-discipline, consistency, endurance and patience to achieve anything worthwhile. As coach John Wooden once said: “Success is peace of mind that is the direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.”
The road to success is not straight. There is a curve called Failure, a loop called Confusion, speed bumps called Friends, red lights called Enemies, caution lights called Family. You will have flat tires called Jobs, but if you have a spare called Determination, an engine called Perserverance, a driver called Will Power, you will make it to a place called Success.
The road to success is not straight. There is a curve called Failure, a loop called Confusion, speed bumps called Friends, red lights called Enemies, caution lights called Family. You will have flat tires called Jobs, but if you have a spare called Determination, an engine called Perserverance, a driver called Will Power, you will make it to a place called Success.
Everything worthwhile is uphill, the climb is steep, and the journey is the reward, as success is not guaranteed, but the struggle is. To make your wildest dream come true, you must be willing to sacrifice, endure, persist, persevere, commit, and relentlessly execute. Whether it is building a business, running a marathon, learning a foreign or programming language, following through on a fitness regimen, becoming financially independent or any other goal you set, it will require a lot of effort, self-discipline and dedication. Success is not guaranteed, and it is also never an accident. As author and motivational speaker Jim Rohn often said: “Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day, while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. It is the accumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgments that leads us to either fortune or failure. Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. We do not fail overnight. Failure is the inevitable result of an accumulation of poor thinking and poor choices.”
Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in. and day out. – Robert Collier.
“Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end, because once you get there, you can move mountains.”—Steve Jobs
Ken Segall worked as an advertising agency creative director for 17 years, both at Apple and at Next. He worked closely with former Apple CEO, Steve Jobs. During his time working with Apple, he began to notice a pattern which formed 10 core elements upon which the book is based. Segall also served as worldwide creative director at agencies for Dell, Intel and IBM.
Insanely Simple’s Theme
“The operative theory here is that, while Apple does many things well—hardware, software, manufacturing, strategy, product launches, PR, marketing, retail, and much more—Simplicity is the common thread that ties them all together.”
Our chief want in life is somebody who will make us do what we can. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
In Swim!: How a Shark, a Suckerfish, and a Parasite Teach You Leadership, Mentoring, and Next Level Success, American former professional basketball player, and peak performance speaker Walter Bond writes about timeless lessons that we can learn from Sharks, Suckerfishes and parasites. How to develop a shark mentality, live with the suckerfishes and manage the parasites in our lives.
Great leaders influence; bad leaders rule. A shark should recognize a suckerfish’s weaknesses or shortcomings and have a heart to help them grow and improve, knowing they are valuable.
At the core of Walter’s teaching is the sacred six:
“When we live in harmony with the Sacred Six, we are truly swimming like sharks. Sharks just don’t swim, they SWIM.
People with a growth mindset tend to think of their intelligence as flexible and able to be expanded with knowledge, effort, and practice. While people with a fixed mindset see intelligence within boundaries, those with a growth mindset view their potential as boundless.
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In Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck shares insights she garnered from decades of research on achievement and success. According to Dr Dweck, there are two types of mindset: Fixed and Growth Mindset. The people with a growth mindset strive to become a better version of themselves, and they believe that with effort and continuous improvement, they would become successful. The people with a fixed mindset believe that their qualities are carved in stone, which creates an urgency to prove themselves repeatedly.
A fixed mindset comes from the belief that your qualities are carved in stone. A growth mindset comes from the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through effort.
Here are my favourite take-aways from reading, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Dr. Carol Dweck:
“Culture is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It’s not something you are. It’s something you do.”
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New York Times bestselling author of The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle, writes about highly successful groups’ secrets. In the Culture Code, Daniel chronicles what makes the world’s most successful organizations tick. He profiles great executives and teams in organizations such as Google, Disney, the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team Six, IDEO, San Antonio Spurs, etc. According to Coyle, cultures are created by a specific set of skills. These skills tap into the power of our social brains to create interactions.
The Premise of the culture code is that group chemistry and building a successful team does not happen by accident; it results from strategies that enhance collaboration and trust-building, leading to positive change. Combining leading-edge science, on-the-ground insights from world-class leaders, and practical ideas for action, The Culture Code offers a roadmap for creating an environment where innovation flourishes, problems get solved, and expectations are exceeded.
Here are my favourite take-aways from reading, The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle.:
We often exaggerate yesterday, overestimate tomorrow and underestimate today.
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In Today Matters, John C. Maxwell shares 12 decisions and disciplines – he calls the daily dozen that can be learned and mastered by anyone to achieve success. A lot of us exaggerate yesterday, overestimate tomorrow, and we underestimate today. According to John, Today Matters, and it is the most important day you will ever experience. The Secret of your success is determined by what you daily.
Here are my favourite takeaways from reading, Today Matters: 12 Daily Practices to Guarantee Tomorrow’s Success.
Today is the only time you have. It’s too late for yesterday. And you can’t depend on tomorrow. That’s why today matters.
Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice, and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do. – Pele
Author Earl Nightingale defined success as the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. This means that any person who knows what they are doing and where they are going is a success. Any person with a goal towards which they are working is a successful person. Success is personal and subjective hence what I think to be successful might not mean success to you but no matter what your definition of success is, you still need to aim for something. Woody Allen once said that 80 percent of success in life is just showing up. It is the writer who sits down every day to write, the entrepreneur who is always growing his business, the salesman who is always pitching, the artist who is always rehearsing, the sportsman who is always at the gym training, the student at the library studying.
You are either Preparing or Repairing.
Life is a series of storms; you are either going through a storm, leaving a storm or heading to the next storm. During the storms, people are going to show you their actual colours. Your so-called friends will become silent, your frenemies will gossip about your situation, and you will feel incredibly lonely. People come into our lives for a reason, a season and a lifetime. During the stormy seasons, few people will stick with you, most will disappear while others will come around to check if you are still stupid.
No matter what season of life you are in, always trust your path, your greatness and your purpose. Don’t engage anyone, situation or relationship that does not value you or your greatness. Vote with your legs by not going to anywhere you are not celebrated or encouraged. You are being called crazy all the time because the people you are hanging around don’t get it yet. Change the crowd you hang around, and those supposedly crazy goals will become routine. If you hang around professional athletes, saying you are going to run a sub-3-hour marathon does not feel out of the world, but if you hang around people aiming to run their first marathon, you will probably be seen as crazy.
That which you most need to find will be found where you least want to look. -Carl Jung.
Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung once said, ‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.’ To make the needed change in any area of one’s life, one must first become aware that change is necessary. What got you here to where you are will not get you where you want to be. We all set goals or wishes at the beginning of the year, but most of us will not follow through due to many factors.
If you live casually, you end up a casualty.
Your mum was right; she probably admonished you with one of these statements: “Don’t hang around the wrong crowd,” and “If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.” This is one of the few things that most parents get right: being able to spot and advise their children against hanging around wrong influences. They know this because they know what hanging around bad influences did to them and the consequences of not setting healthy boundaries against bad associations. Keeping fake and toxic people around you could get you killed, as they do not have your best interest at heart. For most of us, because of the fear of loneliness, we hang on to energy drainers, dream killers, frenemies disguised as siblings, parents, childhood friends and colleagues.
I have been experimenting with the 100 Books Reading Challenge since 2016 and it has become one of my favourite thing to do yearly. I am always striving to become more self-aware, learning new things, understand the world better and become a better version of myself. I strive to read for at 2-3 hours daily via my kindle, laptop, iPod and on my phone. I am not where I want to be but am not where I used to be.
Goal: I read 100 non-fiction books by December 31st, 2022.
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
A young lady went home to visit her mother and told her about her life and how things were so hard for her. She was tired, upset, and annoyed at all these difficulties. Often, she wanted to run away or give up. Her mother listened empathetically, then took the daughter to the kitchen. She filled three pots with water and boiled the water.
She then put a carrot in the first pot, an egg in the second pot, and coffee beans in the third pot. After twenty minutes or so, she turned off the fire and put all three items in separate bowls.
She put these three bowls on the dining table and asked her daughter, “What do you see?”
Intrigued, the daughter replied, “A carrot, an egg, and coffee.”
Greek philosopher Aristotle once quipped: “Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
In Million Dollar Habits: 10 Simple Steps to Getting Everything You Want, Author and speaker Robert Ringer observed:
“A champion doesn’t become a champion in the ring, he’s merely recognized in the ring. His “becoming” happens during his daily routine.” – Joe Louis
