Best kept secrets of successful business people

I am going to tell you the best-kept secrets of some of the unconventional entrepreneurs of this century. These people have built a massive business by doing certain things differently. They have never hesitated to share their stories and success secrets with others.

Hardwork, determination and focus are all necessary to build a successful business but these alone would never help you to reach the pinnacle of success. There are other things at play that you need to know.

1. Choose Yourself:
Most of us on Quora know and follow James Altucher. He inspires us with his blog posts and insightful answers by giving examples from his own life. I recently read his book Choose Yourself in which he talks about how we can generate real inward success (personal happiness and health) and outward success (fulfilling work and wealth).

He talks about the importance of mental, spiritual, physical, and emotional harmony.

Here are one of his recommendations from each of these four pieces:

Mental: “Read two hours a day.”

Spiritual: “Do this every day: wake up and think of five people you are grateful for in your life right now.”

Physical: “Am I sleeping enough?”

Emotional: “Am I expressing gratitude to the people who are good to me?”

I would like to share some of the other intriguing ideas from his book.

• “We are taught from an early age we are not good enough.” This book argues otherwise. We are good enough — we have to use our creativity and entrepreneurship muscles. We are all artists and entrepreneurs. Time to “unlearn the imprisonment,” as James says. “Every time you say ‘yes’ to something you don’t want, your fire goes away.”
• James argues that there is nothing wrong with being mediocre. Being mediocre doesn’t mean you won’t change the world. It means being honest with yourself and the people around you. And being honest at every level is really the most effective habit of all if you want to have massive success.
• “The only way to create value for yourself is to create value for others. Exercise: think of two people in your network who don’t know each other but you think can add value to each other’s lives. Introduce them. Do this every day. Get better and better at it. The more value you bring to the people in your network, even if it doesn’t directly bring value to you (in an immediate way), the greater the value of your network. And then the greater value you will have.”
• The best ideas are when you take two older ideas that have nothing to do with each other, make them have sex with each other, and then build a business around the ugly bastard child that results. The child that was so ugly nobody else wanted to touch it. Look at Facebook: combine the internet with stalking. Amazing!

Once you become a part of the Choose Yourself era achieving success will not seem that difficult. Don’t just become a part of the rat race and start doing something you love and value.

2. Essentialism :
Many a time we try to do a lot of things in life at once. We say yes to a lot of things without even thinking if they are worthy of our time. We do not prioritize our activities which leads to a lot of stress and ultimately burn- outs. Do read the book Essentialism in which the author talks about the importance of concentrating on things that really matter in your life. Here are some excerpts from this wonderful book.

• Only once you give yourself permission to stop trying to do it all, to stop saying yes to everyone, can you make your highest contribution towards the things that really matter.
• Think about what happens to your closet when you never organize it. Wear this someday in the future? Ask more disciplined, tough questions: “Do I love this?” and “Do I look great in it?” and “Do I wear this often?”
• The 90–10 model for making decisions. You can apply to just about every decision or dilemma. As you evaluate an option, think about the single most important criterion for that decision, and then simply give the option a score between 0 and 100. If you rate it any lower than 90 percent, then automatically change the rating to 0.
• Priority. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years. Only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and start talking about priorities.

What did Steve Jobs do when he came back to Apple? He stopped a lot of ongoing projects and told his team to focus on a few which he thought would become the future of Apple. Before saying yes to anything ask yourself Is it worthy of my time?.

3. Have a great mentor:
It is not easy to build a successful business if you are not committed to the task at hand. Most of you might not have heard about Ryan Holiday (http://ryanholiday.net/ ). He dropped out of college at the age of 19 years to apprentice under Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power.

His first book, Trust Me I’m Lying — which the Financial Times called an “astonishing, disturbing book” — was a debut bestseller and is taught in colleges around the world. He is the author of two other books and is now published in 16 languages.

In his blog he talks about a system of Commonplace Book which is a collection of several thousand 4x6 notecards that have ideas, notes on books he liked, quotes that caught his attention, research for projects or phrases . my mentor. He adopted this system from Robert Greene when he was his research assistant. All his books and blog posts came from these notecards which helped him to become successful.

Successful business people always have one or multiple mentors who help them through various stages of life. A great mentor who has already been on a similar journey which you are starting with can help you to avoid various bad decisions which he might have take in his life. Even Steve Jobs had a mentor, Andy Grove whom he consulted at various times whenever he faced a difficult decision.

Don’t be afraid to approach people for mentorship. Many of them will be happy to share their wealth of knowledge with you. A great mentor can sometimes help you to save years in time by helping you overcome various roadblocks easily.

4. Share your story:
This advice may not apply to every business, but I have seen a lot of examples in this internet driven world where a lot of unconventional entrepreneurs have become successful by sharing their story with others.

Many of you might know about Tim Ferriss . He has been listed as one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People”, Forbes Magazine’s “Names You Need to Know,” and is the 7th “most powerful” personality on Newsweek’s Digital 100 Power Index for 2012. I recommend his book The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich to anyone willing to break the shackles of their 9–5 work life.

How did Tim become successful? Was he the most intelligent person in his field? Did he have a network of successful business man to help him?

No in fact he had never written a book before in his life. He became successful because he was willing to share his insights and story with others. He was not afraid of what others will think of him after reading his story. People loved his honest way of telling things and seemed to connect with the same.

Nowadays anyone can build a product by flushing out lines of code from his computer but the products that make the most impact are the ones who have a story associated with them. A lot of startups like Meerkat and Slack have become successful by sharing their story on popular platforms like Medium.

I was so much impressed by the story of this designer Meng To, Design iOS apps with Swift that I thought of buying his book after getting inspired from his story.

In the digital world the business man who make a difference are the ones do not follow the status quo. The people who build their own rules and add value to the businesses are most likely to become successful.

If you liked the story, do recommend it so that more people can read it.