In the last lesson I promised you…
But you are the key, and if there were no teacher you could still learn how to be better all by yourself. Without buying anything. Without reading anything.
Want to know how?
Ouch! Okay, I think of myself as a nice guy, sometimes too nice, but I want to get your attention. I don’t like calling people losers, and I won’t use that term again. But you won’t forget that, will you?
Said nicer, it is possible to figure out the path to success by looking at people who don’t have it, who are failing, then do the opposite.
Look at a unhappily married couple. If you were to ask someone how they relate to one another, you’d get a lot of sentences in the form, “They are always…each other.” “They don’t ever do… for their spouse.”
What if you were to turn it around and then act on it. For instance, instead of, “She is always talking her husband down.” You say, “I will always complement my husband and build him up.”
Or maybe, “He always tells his wife how ugly she is.” Turned around, you would decide, “I will always tell my wife how beautiful she is.”
You can discover a whole marriage seminar, just by doing the opposite of what failing marriages are doing.
Look at the diet of overweight people. If you eliminated whatever they eat the most of, sugar, carbs, fat, etc, do you think you would lose weight?
What about exercise? I knew a doctor who once said, if you want to learn the most efficient way to move – the way that uses the least energy – watch an obese person move. Do you look for the most energy efficient means of doing simple things like walking? Maybe you could do something less effecient like making multiple trips to unload the silverware from the dishwasher instead of taking the silverware container to the drawer and unloading it there.
Look at what unsuccessful business people fear and avoid. Heck, look at what you fear doing. If you faced that fear and did it today, would it make a big difference in your life?
You could move toward success just by moving away from failure, apathy and futility.
There is a difference between not failing and succeeding.
The second means of finding how to be successful would be to look at what successful people do and do the same thing.
In life you should be moving away from what you don’t want and toward what you do. So stop doing what unsuccessful people do, and start doing what successful people do.
Do you know anyone who is living the kind of life you want to live? Find out what they do, and do it.
I have a friend who is rail thing, looks like a runner, but doesn’t exercise at all. He’s eats pretty much whatever he wants. So how does he do it?
The guy can’t sit still. He’s fidgeting all the time. And not just little fidgets, like bouncing his foot. He’ll be sitting talking to you and moving both his legs back and forth the whole time.
So we learned not to be the super efficient of an obese person, but what about learning to have constant movement like my skinny friend.
This is called modeling, and there are lots of levels to it. The simplest is observe them, see what daily actions they take and take those same actions. You could also sit down with them and ask them what they do to achieve the success they do.
A lot of the distinctions I teach on Distinctions For Life are modeled from successful people.
So you’ve learned to move away from the actions and habits of the unsuccessful and move toward the actions and habits of the successful. Neither of which requires a self-help guru.
There is a specific thing you need to look at when modeling successful people.
The thing that separates them from the masses.
The key to modeling them successfully
The secrets they may keep even from themselves.
I’ll share that secret with you in the next lesson.
