9 Success Factors for Achieving Your Best Life

Hello, I'm Brian Tracy again and here are nine success factors that you must know in order to move ahead rapidly in your life. Each one of these success factors has been proven to be critical. That means you have to have it in the achievement of the very best life possible for you or anyone else. By systematically implementing one or more of these success factors into your life, you can put your foot on the accelerator of your own career and you can achieve the very best life for yourself faster than you ever could without doing these things. Now, the first of the nine success factors is education. In our society, the highest paid people are those who know more about what they're doing than the average person. They know more of the critical facts and ideas and information and the skills than the average person in their field. As a result, they can make a more valuable contribution in a knowledge based society and they can live the best life possible. They are valued more, they're respected more, and ultimately they are paid more money and promoted more often because they have more education. The rule is that to earn more, you must learn more. If you want to increase your level of income and achieve the best life for yourself, you must increase your level of intellectual capital and thereby the value of the knowledge component in what you are doing. And you must do it starting today. My friend Jim Rohn said that formal education will make you a living, but personal education will make you rich. And that is true for you. The second of the nine success factors that you can use to achieve the best life possible for you is simply called skill. Your level of ability in your field will determine the quality and quantity of your results. The better you get at what you do, the easier is it for you to start moving forward and to get a particular level of results. As you increase your skill level in your field, through study and experience, you get better and better at doing the small things that increase the speed and predictability of your results. Remember, skills are things that can be developed over and over and all business skills are learnable. You can learn any skill you need to learn to achieve any business goal that you can set for yourself. The third success factor for moving onward and upward in your life is by developing an ever widening circle of contacts. You will find that every major change in your life is accompanied by a person or persons that who either opens or closes doors for you. The possibility of your achieving the best life for you will be determined by the number of people who know you and like you and who are willing to help you. Now, in order to broaden your network of contacts you must network continually. At every opportunity. There seems to be a direct relationship between the number of people you know and, and how successful you are. Now to network successfully. The simple strategy is when you meet a new person, ask them what they do, ask for their business card, and then see if you can't find something that you can do for them. And the one thing that people like the most is if you can send them a customer. Many people who network are thinking, what can I get from this other person? Your strategy, when you meet a new person who can be helpful to you is to think, what can I give to this person, what can I do for this person? And how quickly can I do it? That way you sow seeds of people who will be prepared to help you in the future. One of the most important of the success factors, number four, is money. Having money in the bank gives you greater freedom and the ability to take advantage of opportunities when they come along. If you're broke or in debt and an opportunity comes along, you have no options open to you. There's nothing that you can do. So having money makes you free. One of the most important things I ever learned in life is that you're only as free as your options. If you have no options, if you have to do whatever it is you're doing, you have no choice. You have no freedom. If you're stuck in a dead end job that you can't leave because you have no money set aside, you have put a brake on your potential. You are locked in place and and you have no option for moving forward. You can end up spinning your wheels and losing months and years of your time by the very fact that you have no choice but to accept whatever is being handed to you. But if you have money, they call this opportunity money. If you have money put aside, you can walk away from a bad job and you can take time to find exactly the right job for you. This idea of saving up money so that you are available to take opportunities has transformed many people's lives. Now, the fifth of the success factors that enables you to get far more done in a shorter period of time to dramatically accelerate your career is called simply good work habits. Your ability to increase your roti, or return on time invested, can enable you to accomplish vastly more in a shorter period of time than another person who is disorganized and sloppy. Developing good work habits requires that you think before acting. You make a list, and you set priorities on the list before you begin. Good work habits require that you consider the likely consequences, positive or negative of what you're doing. There's a rule that says every minute that you spend in planning saves 10 minutes in execution. The more you think through and plan and set priorities on your work, the vastly more you produce and the more valuable you become. The sixth success factor that we have discovered for your career and life is a positive mental attitude. It's to reduce the amount of time that it takes you to achieve your goals by becoming so positive that other people will help you. And a positive mental attitude is very much a decision that you make for yourself. Remember, nobody makes you feel anything. Everything that you feel is determined by the way you decide to react to a situation. And remember, you become what you do. If you engage in the same activities that positive, confident, optimistic people engage in, you will eventually become what you one of them and live your best life possible. Now, anyone can remain positive when things are going well. It is your ability to look for the good in every situation that you begin to see positive things and start moving forward in life. The work at the University of Pennsylvania called this your interpretation or interpretive style. How do you explain things to yourself? If you interpret things that happen to you in a positive way, you remain positive. If you explain them in a negative way, you become negative. But the choice is always yours. The seventh of the success factors that you can incorporate into your lifestyle and one that can help you achieve the best life for yourself, is the development of a positive image. Remember, people judge you by the way you look on the outside, by the way you appear. The fact is that you judge everyone else by the way they look on the outside as well. Taking time to present an attractive image in your person, your clothing, your grooming, and your accessories can have an inordinate impact on the doors that open for you and the people who are willing to help you start moving forward in your life. Look at the pictures of the people who are most successful in your field and you'll probably find that they look really good in their photographs and so can you. Now, creativity is another wonderful way, number nine, to start moving forward in life and increase the speed at which you achieve your goals. Creativity is something that requires that you continually look for better, faster, easier, cheaper ways to get your job done. Remember, one good idea is all you need to start a fortune or transform your career. Now, perhaps the most important of the success factors to accelerating your life and career is your character. 9 Self discipline combined with honesty will open countless doors for you. Now, trust is the foundation of all relationships. When people know you and believe in you and are convinced that they can trust you to keep your word and do what you say you will do, they'll feel that they are far more likely to get the things they want through you to get the things they want faster, sooner and easier, and with greater certainty. And when you apply all of these concepts together to becoming a better and more efficient and more effective person, your life will start to move ahead so rapidly that you will be astonished, and so will everybody around you.