11 Habits of Highly Successful People

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Jason Michael

If you want to achieve and sustain success, there are some simple, easy actions all successful people take every day. Success, like anything else, is a habit, and here are the 11 daily habits to get and keep success knocking on your door.

1. Think Your Way to Success.

See the opportunity in every situation. This requires you to train yourself to think positive, to think success thoughts, and to force yourself to avoid allowing negative thoughts to enter your mind.

2. Avoid Overly Negative People.

They drain your energy, bring you down, and beat you into submission with their extensive experience. Avoid them as much as possible.

3. Feed Forward to Success.

Constantly seek out opportunities to address the needs of others and you’ll be the recipient of the boomerang effect. What goes around comes around, so make feeding forward a habit, and you’ll attract success habitually.

4. Never Deflect Responsibility.

Accept responsibility for your success as well as for your failures. Being consistent in accepting responsibility for your actions increases your “trust-ability”, and the more trust you have, the more successful you’ll become.

5. Eliminate “Getting Around To It”.

Most people wait for the perfect time or situation before they start taking action. “Getting around to it” is a surefire way to remain an underachiever, and that’s why most people remain average. To be successful, you must do the opposite every single day. Be action oriented and forward focused.

6. Speak with Confidence.

Always be mindful of the impact your words may have on the audience you’re speaking to. When you do speak, speak with the confidence of a leading authority on the subject and the humility of a trusted spiritual leader.

7. Post and Read Your Goals.

It’s been proven over and over – those who achieve success write their goals down and read them daily. When you do so, your mind is constantly filtering information and bringing things that support your goals to your conscious awareness. This creates triggers, and successful people use those triggers to take action.

8. Be Adaptable.

The success path is never a straight line so you must be willing to change course frequently. Remember, water always takes the path of least resistance. As Bruce Lee famously said, “Be water, my friend.”

9. Recover from Mistakes Quickly.

You can’t move forward if you’re always looking back. Successful people recover quickly from mistakes by acknowledging what didn’t work, vowing to never intentionally repeat the mistakes, and charting a new course of action based on the lessons learned.

10. Increase Your Return On Luck (ROL).

In his latest book, Great By Choice, Jim Collins points out that successful people experience the same amounts of good and bad luck as everyone else. What makes them successful is what they do with the good luck. “Getting a high return on luck requires throwing yourself at the luck event with ferocious intensity, disrupting your life, and not letting up. The whole point is to become exceptional.”

11. Be Aggressive When Needed, Humble when Required, Driven Always.

Using a one size fits all strategy is never going to yield sustainable success. Successful people know this, and they are adept at being a chameleon in order to get what they want when they want it.

By taking these 11 actions every day, you significantly increase the probability of achieving what you want. As Collins so correctly stated in Great By Choice, “Resilience, not luck, is the signature of greatness.” You can’t be resilient unless you’ve made it a habit, and these 11 actions will increase your resiliency.

For more tips and strategies on thinking your way to success, explore more of this website, subscribe to this blog, and follow me on social media (Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook). By doing so, you will gain access to leading edge research on management and leadership development and have access to daily inspirational and motivational quotes that will drive your success trajectory upward. So don’t delay, follow me and think yourself to success today!