The Principles of Success

Here are my general principles of achieving success. These rules can be applied to ANYTHING. You can use them to get rich, to improve on an martial arts and sport, to be happier, to get a fantastic relationship, to learn how to increase your rate of success, etc. The point is you can use them on anything.

The principles are general, because as you apply them to different areas the specifics will vary, but each one is an essential part of the success formula.

The principles are best used all together so there is no particular order to do them in. If you are completely new to a field, like you want to learn how to do Karate then it may be best to get practise before you set your goal. Or if you want to earn money it may be best to define exactly what you want and then get coaching before you start doing. So the principles are best used together and not necessarily in any particular order.

Here are the principles.

1. Define EXACTLY what you want.
To do this you can apply basic goal setting techniques. I have described my preferred method in my article How to Complete Goals - The Chunk Method.

2. Practise and do
Start doing whatever it is you will have to do to eventually achieve your goal. If you want to be a black belt at Karate, go out and start training and practising the moves. This is the key factor that PRODUCES RESULTS.

3. Receive coaching and / or read about it
Go out and learn more about it. This is important at all stages in your development, because other people's perspectives can be very useful in guiding you on the way to your final goal. This can also help you significantly boost your understanding and help you know the most effective course of action to achieve your goal.

4. Copy the best
A VERY powerful tool. There are so many people out there who are millionaires, but how many people go out and ask them "how did you do that?". After finding out what they do, copy their methods and model their techniques. You don't always have to go out and find these people you can also read about them on the internet or their autobiographies.

I believe all the principles need to be used to achieve success as fast as possible. If you spend all your time writing goals you'll never achieve anything. If you spend 6 days a week working 10 hours a day you won't produce as much value overall compared to if you read about how to become more productive. If you just read books on martial arts you'll never understand exactly how the moves work in real-life. If you just watched the best you might not ever really understand what they are doing that's different to you.

Now the only assumption I've made with this success formula is that you have the motivation to go out and do all of these things. I have discussed one technique for beating laziness and inertia in this post and I will be discussing motivation in the near future.

My principles are general, so they are open to interpretation. I prefer it this way because I do not believe life can be summarised into one small model (see my post on releasing the model theory). What I think is most useful about these principles is that you can vastly improve your rate of success just by introducing a missing principle to your current activities.

I hope this helps guys.