Qualities of Successful People in Business and in Life (Part 1)

Qualities of Successful People in Business and in Life (Part 1)

Qualities of Successful People – So the other day I started thinking what are the common patterns and characteristics of people who are very successful in business and in life. One of my personal hobbies is to study success and I have studied a lot of sociological materials and also biography , histories where i just sit down and dissect people from the last several thousand years of human history and I take a look at what ticked in their life, what went behind the science?

How did they actually work? How did they get to some of these amazing positions that they were able to get to? Whether it is an artist, a performer, an actor or political leader or a business person, an entrepreneur, whoever and so I came up with the following list of the characteristics which I think is quiet accurate because basically what I did is that I cross-referenced a lot of stuff I read for the last 5 years and I want to present that to you here. If you are someone that has been struggling with success who wants to really make it big in life then these are the points you must be really mindful of going forward, making sure that you plug any holes that you have in this list. So here we go. These are in no particular order, am not saying that the first ones are the most important. Basically I think that they are all important.

Passion

Successful people are passionate people. not only are they passionate about what they do which is a cliché because you probably know that already but here is something that you might not have thought about before: I think that what’s going on deep a person’s psychology if they are successful is that they are inspired on some level by life, somewhere. Are you inspired by life? maybe you are inspired by art or by nature or by music or by writing or by speaking or by other examples of amazing people or you are inspire by technology in science or by human knowledge – something about life has to inspire you. This is kind of a deeper point. For example let’s talk about an amazing mathematician. The reason he is amazing is not because he is good at math, that’s a mediocre mathematician because anyone can just be good at math.  An amazing mathematician loves math. He doesn’t just love math or is passionate about math but something in math inspires him in an almost spiritual level and I think that this is true across the board with successful people.

Hard Working

Another characteristic is that they are hard working. Successful people are very very hard working, abnormally hard working. Mediocre people which is the opposite of successful people – these people are not hard working, they are lazy and they work 40 hours a week and that’s just about it. They put in their minimum to get by. That’s not the case with successful people. Successful people are obsessive about how they work. They are almost workaholics and this can become a negative trait. Mind you, not all the characteristics am going to be listing here are positive traits. Some of these can backfire on you if you take them to one extreme where they become actually quiet toxic. A lot of successful people can’t stop doing work, they just can’t stop so this is actually one of their weaknesses. But it is also a very important strength because you are not going to get successful without massive amounts of hard work. Strong work ethic is absolutely necessary.

Also Read: The Fear of Failure in Business and in Life.

Persistent

Also successful people are extremely persistent. This is another cliché you have probably heard a lot but you don’t really phantom the importance of persistence until you have actually tried to accomplish something big in your life. Especially something that has low odds of success – like you try to become an actor, or start a business. When you try to do these things you will see how easily and how often you fail and how hard it is to keep working in the face of failure over and over again.  You just fail again again and again but you just have to keep going if you want to be successful. You see, successful people have a high tolerance for failure, they don’t take it personally, and they don’t get depressed about it. They just keep going forward every single time until they get to their goal. This is a very rare characteristic in people which is why success is quiet uncommon.

Rule Breakers

Successful people are rule breakers. These people do not follow the rules of society, organizations, family unit or religious structure. This does not necessarily mean that they do illegal stuff. It just means that they are kind of flexible with the rules, they are able to skirt around the rules, bend the rules, to think outside the box. And this is important because to get stuff past through the system requires thinking outside the box a lot. If you are thinking inside the box then you will just get the results of the math of the herd and the herd doesn’t really get extraordinary results and that’s not being successful but mediocre.

Cleverness

Successful people are abnormally clever and manipulative than the bunch. They are good at manipulating situations and people to get what they want past through. So maybe this person is good at manipulating a bureaucracy, a government system, manipulating their family, friends, people in their company, manipulating crowds the way that politicians sometimes do. Manipulation can off course be bad but it doesn’t necessarily have to be used towards evil as it can also be used towards good. Some form of manipulation can be used as a tool or tactic that can be used. It’s an ability that people have. Some people are good manipulators and other people are bad manipulators. If you are bad manipulator, it’s going to be hard for you to become successful. And if you are not very clever about how you do your manipulation at thinking around obstacles and problems then you are just going to hit an obstacle and it’s going to look to you like a giant brick wall. If you are not going to be clever enough to realize like ”  I can walk around it” or “I can dig my way under it” or “I can bash my way through it with a sledge hammer”. You see, that requires some cleverness which is very important because you are going to have a lot of obstacles on your journey towards success.

Training in Technical Skills

Successful people have training in some form of technical skills. They are willing to train hard to develop their technical skills in whatever field they are trying to master. This is an obstacle for many people because they just assume that if “I put in my time in my 9 – 5 job, that’s enough to make me successful”. But the truth is that it won’t. You will need to do something that is called “deliberate practice”. This is where you deliberately practice a set of skills over and over again until you master it finally. And this takes a lot of hard work which most people are not willing to do. But successful people can spend thousands of hours mastering technical skills. What do I mean by “technical skills”? If you are a computer programmer, then it’s the programming skills, if you are a speaker then it’s the speaking skills, if you are an actor then it’s the acting skills, if you are a secretary then it’s the typing skills. Every single career or field that you are going to be successful in has a certain technical skills that needs to be mastered to perfection and that takes a lot of deliberate practice to do. Most people are not willing to do that so they remain mediocre because they have mediocre technical skills.

Excellence

Successful people value excellence above the mediocre people. They really want to do excellent work. They take pride in their work. They have this sense of being the best in what they do or doing something really exceptionally well. That gives them a certain joy or satisfaction that a mediocre people doesn’t have. To the mediocre person, doing an average or poor job is good enough and that does not cut it if you want to be successful.

Vision

Successful people are visionaries. This means that they can see a big bright picture of what the future should look like for them, for their life, for their followers, business partners, customers, etc. They see into the future. That is a very powerful skill to develop. They are automatic leaders because they have a vision so they can lead people. They don’t necessarily have to leader millions of people. There are successful people who lead very few people but nevertheless they are leaders. Because what they are doing is that they are carving their own path through life and they are at the cutting edge of their field and they are not content to just be followers. They don’t just pick someone to follow then follow that person to success. No, they do a bit of that but ultimately they have to break off from anyone they have followed in their lives and do it themselves, their own way. That usually means doing something in some new unique way that hasn’t been done before. That’s where the clever thinking comes in. In fact all these points all synergize together as one characteristic requires the other in many cases.

Intuition

I also found out that successful people are intuitive more than the average person. They know how to use their intuition as they are guided by their heart and their gut more than just their logical mind. They are holistic thinkers. They can take in and assess multiple variables in a complex and holistic way that they can get a big picture of the future and what needs to be done. And sometimes it comes to them as a gut feeling. They don’t even know where it comes from. For example, a good entrepreneur just gets this gut feeling that ” we need to enter into this new market place, or that “we need to change our marketing in this way” or that “we need to lunch this new product that everybody said that people don’t want but I just feel like the market wants this product”. They might end up being right because they are using their gut.

Decisive

Successful people are decisive and this is a huge point. Most mediocre people are highly indecisive. They don’t know how to choose between this career or that career, This major or that major. They ask questions like: “I have 10 different majors – which major should I choose?” or “I can go into 5 different lines of businesses, which business should I do?” Most people really hesitate there. They don’t make a firm decision and they are not clear about what they want in life so they get just that. They get a molded and mediocre result. If you want an excellent result then you have to be crystal clear about what you want. That’s what successful people manage to do.

Money

Successful people do not do what they do because of the money. If you think that you are going to become successful because you have put money first and money is your top priority /goal and this will motivate you to be really successful? Then you are putting the cart before the horse and you have got this whole equation backwards. You are actually selling yourself short and you will be far less successful than you could have otherwise been. For successful people it’s not about the money. Sure, money can come as a byproduct but that’s not why they do what they do. Successful people are motivated because they want to impact the world or that they want to have a positive contribution to the society or maybe because they have got a big ego or a lot of pride, which is not necessarily a very healthy drive but still that superior to being driven by money alone. Most successful people just love they actual work that they do. They are passionate about it such that it more or less comes naturally. Not because of money.

I hope these few points made some sense to you. Qualities of successful people in business and in life (Part 2) will be posted shortly. If you have any questions or suggestions, use our comment area. Thank you

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