I’ve just finished reading an article entitled How To Achieve Success In Everything, written by a fellow personal development blogger, Vincent Tan @ HealthMoneySuccess.com.
It’s a good piece of writing, which talks about the Ultimate Success Formula that anyone can use to achieve success in life.
It’s a simple 4-step formula. Let me just give you a brief outline of the formula here.
Step 1: Have a Goal
Decide what you want. You can’t achieve what you want when you don’t know what is it that you want.
Step 2: Have a Strategy
Once you set your goal, you need to devise a strategy to achieve it. Everything is possible only if you have the right strategy.
Step 3: Take Action
Action is what separates the winners from the losers. Without action, the only result you’ll get is no result.
Step 4: Feedback
When you follow your strategy and take action, there are only 2 possible outcomes – either you fail or you succeed. If you don’t get the result you want, just change your strategy and take action again. Repeat this process until you finally get to where you want to be.
It’s a great formula. It’s simple, though not necessarily easy.
However, upon finishing reading the article, it got me thinking. Besides the formula, what else do we need in order to achieve success?
After a moment of brainstorming, I figured there are 2 more things that are essential to achieving success. They are the skill-sets and leverage. There are altogether 6 skill-sets and 5 different forms of leverage that you’d need.
Skill-Sets
Besides the technical skill required in your profession (designing, cooking, accounting, etc), there are a number of other skill-sets you need to acquire to propel yourself to greater heights, regardless of whichever field you’re in.
If you want to get what you want in life, you have to learn how to sell. Many people do not like the idea of selling for various reasons such as fear of rejection, a stigma on salespeople, bad experiences with salespeople, selling is low-grade, and so on.
But the truth is, we’re constantly engaged in selling in our everyday life. We’re always trying to get someone to ‘buy’ our ideas. We had the habit of selling since we were a kid even without us knowing.
For e.g. when you were a kid, you’d always try to sell your parents the idea why you need that bicycle, why you need more pocket money, why you should be allowed to stay out late, why it’s ok that you have a girlfriend/boyfriend, and so on.
When you grow up, you’re still selling endlessly either to your spouse on why you should buy a car, to your potential employer on why you should be given the job, to your boss on why you deserve a pay increment, to your clients on why you’d do a better job than anyone else, or to your dream girl on why she should go on a date with you, etc.
You need to acknowledge the fact that you are never done with selling. You’re always trying to sell something to someone. Most of the times, it may just be an idea. But no matter what, you need to sell to get what you want.
Negotiation is another activity you constantly engage in your everyday life. Be it between you and your boss, your spouse, your parents, your friends, your suppliers, your children, you’re always negotiating to get what you want.
For e.g. you’re watching a football game and your wife asks you to go wash the dishes. You said you’ll do it after the game, but she insists that you do it now. And so you start the negotiation process.
It’s natural that we always want to get what we want in life. And the fact is, whatever it is you want in life, you can negotiate for it and get it.
Can you imagine having the ability to always get other people to give you what you want without compromising too much of your own terms? Awesome…
One of the most challenging tasks you can ever face in your professional or personal life is dealing with people.
In his best selling book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie mentioned that, “Investigations revealed that even in such technical lines as engineering, about 15 percent of one’s financial success is due to one’s technical knowledge and about 85 percent is due to skill in human engineering – to personality and the ability to read people.”
Your technical expertise, creativity and talent may help you land a job, but it is your ability to speak with confidence to anyone, anywhere, anytime that will land you the top job.
Everywhere you go you need to work with people. Therefore, communicating effectively with them is the most important skill you can possess.
All successful people are leaders. And as a leader, you need to learn how to manage your people effectively in order to maximise their productivity.
As mentioned earlier, one of the most challenging tasks you can ever face in your professional or personal life is dealing with people. And that applies to managing people too.
You can be assured that the people you work, no matter who they are, are bound to give you all sorts of problems which can cause a lot of stress and tension.
So, in order to live a healthier and happier life, you need to learn how to manage the people you work with to get things done the way they are supposed to be done.
To be truly successful in life, you need to achieve at least financial freedom (Personally, I aim to achieve financial abundance).
No amount of success is complete without financial success. Even for someone like Mother Theresa needs financial success.
Mother Theresa may have led a simple, albeit extraordinary, life. She may not have needed personal financial success, but she still needed funds to help her carry out her noble causes around the world. At least the church she represented needed to have financial success.
And to achieve financial success, one of the most important criteria is to be able to manage your money well.
As T. Harv Eker said, “Rich people manage their money well. Poor people mismanage their money well.”
The next criterion to becoming financially successful is to become a good investor because you need to know how to make your money work hard for you instead of just you working hard for money.
You may think that investment is way too sophisticated a skill to learn and that you prefer to leave the task of investing to a money manager.
But let me tell you this. If you want to be successful, you have to assume 100% responsibility for your own success.
And let me tell you another truth. All skills are learnable, including investment skill. You’re never too unsophisticated to learn. And you’re never too old to learn. It’s only a matter of whether you want to learn. If you commit yourself to learn it, nothing can possibly stop you.
Next, I’m going to list all the different kinds of leverage which you’d need to help you achieve success faster and easier.
“Leverage is the power to control a lot with just a little.” – The One Minute Millionaire
Leverage
1. Team
One truth about millionaires is that no one millionaire is self-made. Success is not a lone ranger task. It is always a team effort. No matter how capable and how hardworking you are, a solo effort can never achieve what a team effort can achieve.
However, not just any team can achieve success. Only a team with positive, dedicated, committed and fun loving members can achieve great success.
As a team leader, you also need to ensure that each of your team members is aligned with your vision and values.
Most importantly, you have to understand your own strengths and weaknesses so that you can recruit team members who possess complementary abilities so that they can work on the areas you’re weak in.
When two persons on the same team possess the same skill-set, one is redundant.
2. Mentors
One shortcut to success is to seek out people who had done what you want to do, and have achieved what you want to achieve to be your mentors.
It would be best if you could have someone hold you by your hands and show you the rope every step of your way to success.
But if you don’t have a mentor like that, what you can do is to attend seminars/workshops conducted by people who’d been there and done that.
Also, you can read the biographies of people you admire, read articles about them, study the books, audios, and videos by them or about them. You can learn a lot from these sources.
And not forgetting that a lesson can be learnt anytime, anywhere. Incidents like retrenchment, a car accident, a life threatening disease, a problem at work, a quarrel with your spouse, can all be very good ‘mentors’. You can always learn something out of these incidents.
3. Networks
There’s a saying that goes, “It’s not what you know, but who you know.” As mentioned earlier, no millionaire is self-made. It is the result of the concerted effort of a lot of people, including people outside your own team.
So, the bigger your network, the more leverage you have. Imagine you have a team of 5 people, and each person knows 100 people. Right away, you have 500 people in your immediate network.
And if these 500 people know another 100 people each, it becomes 50,000 people in your immediate and extended network!
Of course, networking is not just about the numbers. It’s also about knowing the key contact in your networks. Sometimes it can be extremely hard, or simply impossible to get things done if you do not have the connection to the right contact.
In order to increase your chances for success, always do your best to maintain the relationships you’ve built with your contacts.
4. Tools
Now that we’re living in the information age, the tools that are essential to your success are new technology advancements like the computers, hand held devices, Internet, social networking media, and any new technology innovations related to your field of work.
Apart from acquiring the necessary tools, you also have to ensure that you learn how to use them personally and not leave the responsibility to someone else.
5. System
In Michael Gerber’s best selling book, The E-Myth Revisited, the core message of the book was that, the reason most American small businesses fail is because the business owners failed to develop a proper system to run the business.
A proper system is meant to increase your productivity and efficiency, thereby increasing your business bottom line.
Successful business people understand this principle. Top real estate agents understand this principle. So do all other highly successful people, regardless of the field they work in.
In the early 50s, American statistician, Dr. Edwards Deming, validated that 94% of all failures are due to the failure in the system, not the people.
If you want to achieve predictably positive result, you need to develop a system that will deliver the desired result no matter who are the people running the system, especially in business. If you don’t have a proper system in place, you’re dead meat.
Now if you’d commit yourself to pick up the skills and use the leverage to your advantage, you’d see a quantum leap in your career.
Cheers~
P.S. What additional skills have you acquired to help you advance in your career? Apart from those listed in the article, what other skills and/or leverage do you think will be able to help you achieve success? I’d love to have you share your views in the comment section. 
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