The secret to success for every person who has ever been successful lies in the fact that “they formed the habit of doing things that failures don’t like to do”. It’s just as true as it sounds and it’s just as simple as it seems. You can hold it up to the light, you can put it to the acid test, and you can kick it around until it’s worn out, but when you are done, it will still remain the secret whether we like it or not. It single-handedly explains why highly-qualified and experienced professionals go into a business or profession with seemingly every prerequisite for success only to end up as disappointing failures at best, while others have achieved outstanding success in spite of many real or perceived obvious shortcomings. It is a good idea to help us to determine the sort of future we will have because it is good at that. Let us get into the details of the all-encompassing secret that I’m referring to. The secret of every successful person is public information: he or she has formed the habit of doing things that failures do not like to do. These are the very things that you, I and others hate doing. We have to recognise that success is one of those achievements by the minority people. For this reason, success is uncommon, unusual, unnatural and even bizarre. We do not achieve it by indulging our natural preferences or prejudices. The things that failures don’t like to do, in general, are too many and too obvious for us to exhaustively discuss here. And so, since our success in every endeavour lies in our ability to persuade others to do what we would like them to do, let’s discuss the things we don’t like to do. They are too many to allow a specific discussion, but I believe they can all be disposed of by saying that they all emanate from one basic dislike, common to all of us. We don’t like to talk to people about something they may not want to talk about. Any reluctance to approach someone, to suggest a change in their activity, to persuade them to take a new approach is caused by this one basic dislike. Perhaps you have wondered what is behind this peculiar lack of welcome on the part of those we’re trying to persuade. Isn’t it due to the fact that our prospects are human too? And isn’t it true that the average human being is highly resistant to change even when it’s for their own improvement, and is therefore prone to escape our efforts to persuade them to do something they don’t want to do by striking at the most important weakness we possess- our desire to be appreciated? The writer is an expert on attitude and human potential.
