Successful people are in the habit...

I received this in an email today from Bob Proctor.

Several years ago I was brought face to face with the very disturbing realization that I was trying to supervise and direct the efforts of a large number of people who were trying to achieve success, without knowing myself what the secret of success really was. And that, naturally, brought me face to face with the further realization that regardless of what other knowledge I might have brought to my job, I was definitely lacking in the most important knowledge of all.

Of course, like most of us, I had been brought up on the popular belief that the secret of success is hard work, but I had seen so many people work hard without succeeding and so many people succeed without working hard that I had become convinced that hard work was not the real secret, even though in most cases it might be one of the requirements.
And so I set out on a voyage of discovery which carried me through biographies and autobiographies and all sorts of dissertations on success and the lives of successful people until I finally reached the point at which I realized that the secret I was trying to discover lay not only in what people did, but also in what made them do it.

I realized further that the secret for which I was searching must not only apply to every definition of success, but since it must apply to everyone to whom it was offered, it must also apply to everyone who had ever been successful. In short, I was looking for the common denominator of success. And, because that is exactly what I was looking for, that is exactly what I found.

But this common denominator of success is so big, so powerful, and so vitally important to your future and mine that I'm not going to make a speech about it. I'm just going to "lay it on the line" in words of one syllable, so simple that anybody can understand them.

The common denominator of success - the secret of success of 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 all through with it, it will still be the common denominator of success, whether we like it or not.

It will still explain why people have gone into a business or profession with every apparent qualification for success and have been nothing but disappointing failures, while others have achieved outstanding success in spite of many obvious handicaps. And since it will also explain your future, it would seem to be a mighty good idea for you to use it in determining just what sort of future you are going to have. In other words, let's take this big, all-embracing secret and boil it down to fit you.

If the secret of success lies in forming the habit of doing things that failures don't like to do, let's start the boiling-down process by determining what are the things that failures don't like to do. The things that "failures" don't like to do are the things that you and I and other human beings, including successful people, naturally don't like to do. In other words, we've got to realize right from the start that success is something which is achieved by the minority of people...and is therefore "unnatural" and not to be achieved by following our natural likes and dislikes nor by being guided by our natural preferences and prejudices.

Excerpted from The Common Denominator of Success by Albert E.N. Gray

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