
The Number One Habit of Highly Successful People
Success isn’t an accident. Sure there are always a few lucky exceptions here or there, but success is usually achieved through work — hard work. That hard work is usually made up of a handful of shared habits that, when practiced again and again, turn the gears of the success machine.
There are a myriad of books and lists out there highlighting some of those habits, and they’re all fine and well — but there’s one habit in particular that helped me the most: Self-reflection.
Part of self-reflection is clarity. You need to have a clear focus on your goals so you can align all your actions to achieve it. Let me show you how clarity and self-reflection helped me achieve my goals.
When I decided I wanted to become a professional speaker, I focused all my attention and energy on it. I talked about it until I was blue in the face. I joined a professional network for speakers called Toastmasters and went to meetings once, sometimes twice a week for more than a year. We would speak, get feedback, learn, then go back and do it again. And again. And again.
I had to hone my craft before I could succeed in it. This is something else highly successful people do. They hone their craft, becoming masters in their skill or field. Yes, this take time. But how do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. No one masters a skill by accident; it must be honed.
Now, not only was I just speaking at Toastmasters but I was talking about speaking everywhere I went. I made sure people knew this is what I wanted to do, that this was my goal. I asked everyone in earshot where I could get more experience, more exposure. Eventually, I began speaking at local not for profit, professional development organizations, then began traveling to speak at conferences and joined a leadership program and began traveling to other countries to help further my craft and get more experience and exposure.
This leadership journey started in Marseille, France, continued on to Marrakesh, Morocco, and finished in Istanbul, Turkey. At the end of this particular tour, program members had to select who would be their spokesperson to speak on their behalf at the graduation in Istanbul. And guess who they chose? The person that’d been speaking about speaking for the whole tour. I made my goals known, and once an opportunity to exercise my skills came about, I was able to actualize on that goal.
It’s the law of attraction. When you have full clarity on knowing what you want, when you focus and put that out into the universe, you’ll inevitably attract it. Talk about it. Keep putting out a positive attitude towards your goals, and share that positivity with everyone you can and eventually the opportunities that you need will find you.
Take, for instance, my hobby as a DJ. I had gotten into it several years after starting my speaking career. It was just a hobby I had a lot of interest in, but I spoke about it enough, to enough people, that eventually, while I was in a conference in Singapore, I got invited to DJ a 700+ person event in Munich, Germany a few weeks later. It’s the law of attraction.
Now I bring my DJ equipment with me whenever I travel. Word quickly spread throughout the community that I was also a DJ and people starting inviting me to perform to open and close conferences and even DJ between speakers — and in large arenas no less — giving me maximum exposure for something else I’m passionate about. I even DJed Forsyth Barr Stadium in New Zealand. But none of this would have ever happened had I not expressed my interests and desires to those around me, had I not had clarity on what I wanted.
If you have enough clarity to examine your wants, your passions, you will develop the ability to see how to attain those passions. You can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket. You can’t realize your goals if you don’t know what they are, and if you don’t share your intentions and work towards making it a possibility.
Self-reflection begins with taking an inventory of yourself and learning what’s most important to you, what you’re most passionate about. Once you find that goal, you can identify and focus on the top three or four things you can do to help get you to that goal. From there, you can develop the other habits that will promote those things. And eventually, with enough time and effort, success will find you.
But it all begins with self-reflection. You can’t hope to travel to your dream destination if you don’t identify where that dream destination is. Once you know where you want to end up, it’s much easier to find out the cornerstone pieces that will get you there. Then it’s just a matter of following the path.
