Atlanta

INTRODUCTION

Have you ever wondered why you aren’t more successful? Have you had the same thought about a business associate, friend, or family member who seems to have much potential yet is never really successful at anything? I sure have, and I have seen some amazing contrasts. People with virtually no ability to become successful have seemingly done the impossible, while others who appear to be loaded with looks, money, and talent never seem to get it together. They look like they have it all yet never really experience lasting success.

Are You as Successful as You Want to Be?

I have studied the lives of thousands of people over the last two decades as a success coach and counselor. I saw two remarkable distinctions between those who were really living the life they wanted and others who never quite reached their dreams. One group, a very small group, always seemed to win in spite of the odds. They had mastered what I came to view as success secrets. A much larger group seemingly had an L imprinted on their foreheads as though they were destined to lose. It seemed they were programmed to fail at everything and never achieve lasting success. I have heard hundreds of excuses from this L group. Listen to some recent explanations about why these people never made it, and see if any of these apply to you or the people in your world.

I just wasn’t smart enough.

When our business failed, it was over for us.

I married the wrong woman, and she ruined my life.

It was the alcohol. One day it just took over.

My sister got all the breaks. Mom liked her more than me.

It was my weight, and no one will give a fat person a chance.

I was always at the wrong place at the wrong time.

I screwed up my life in college and just never got over it.

I just never had a chance to be successful.

I guess I’m just not lucky.

Do you hear the common theme in these explanations about failure in life? Notice the feelings of being totally out of control. Listen to the blame shifting, the avoidance, the escapism as well as the pity. It’s no wonder people who think and talk this way fail. There are several reasons people hide behind excuses to explain their lack of success in life.

They tell lies to cover up their failures instead of facing them.

They failed so many times that it hurts to even think about trying again.

They never think about the real issues causing their empty life.

They are asleep, unconscious of the fact that life is going on around them.

They are in serious denial about what is missing in their life.

They never had a coach or mentor to guide them onto a path of success.

They gave up on a better life.

I suspect that it may be a little bit of each of these, yet I discovered some tremendous insights from working with thousands of people overcoming serious difficulties. Problems, pressure, and panic caused one group to give up on their dreams of success while serving as hidden sources of energy for the successful to live out their dreams. I saw the group with the secrets of success crash through the very roadblocks that limited or handicapped others. Those who knew the secrets had a significantly better quality of life.

What about you? Are you in the small group who live out their dreams and experience success after success, or is your life checkered by failure after failure? Once you answer that question, here’s another.

Do You Get Stronger during Difficult Times?

In the lives I studied, I noticed that some people faced difficult situations and got weaker, which seemed normal until I noticed others going through identical circumstances who toughened up to become amazingly successful. They lived at a higher level. It was almost as if the problems and stress gave them a shot of turbo-charged fuel to move up to a higher level. When people mastered these secrets, they too had this hidden source of power to live out the life they wanted. Their age, education, or socioeconomic class didn’t matter. And their past didn’t matter as much as the personal realization that they could live out their hopes and dreams. So consider this question.

Could This Be Your Time to Discover Lasting Success?

I enjoy seeing people come alive when they discover and apply the secrets of success. I love it when coaching clients get it, when the lightbulb in their mind illuminates with the insight of how to be successful instead of having to face one more crisis, one more failure, one more loss, or one more breakdown. It is always an adventure, and sometimes the most unlikely are the very ones who grasp the secrets of success, apply them, and achieve a quality of life that surprises everyone—everyone but them, that is. Where did they find the fountain of wisdom that allows them to have the unshakable confidence to accomplish their dreams when the majority of people around them seem to be failing?

If you take an honest look at your own life, you will likely see a common pattern in your behavior. The same principle is true of your personal or professional life or of the history of your business, friends, or family. Track the events over time, and it will appear as if there was a mental radar that led straight to another failed relationship, business venture, or personal crisis. Even if your best friend got in your face and begged you to stop, you may have gone over the edge one more time. Like a movie script that predicted a series of breakdowns and failures, you fell down right on cue.

Isn’t It Time to Rewrite the Script?

So how can you undo the dangerous flaws that set you up to fail and reverse the process to set yourself up to win? Simple: You have to master the seven secrets of success, the essential beliefs and behaviors practiced by the most successful people in our culture. These elements are usually overlooked and rarely used, which is why I call them secrets. When uncovered and practiced, however, these secrets lead to a significantly better quality of life. Since you and I know that you need to make some radical changes to experience lasting success, let’s get started in the direction of your dreams. Our new destination: success! Let’s take action to experience the quality of life you have always wanted to live. Let’s work together to rewrite the script of your life to include lasting success this time around.

I am going to serve as your personal success coach to guide you past the subtle dangers that have been stealing your creative ability to think successfully. Together we will discover and disarm other dangers that have either blocked or seemingly eliminated the incredible things available to you. If you will allow me, I can lead you onto the pathway of success that you have been missing. If not, you may be stuck on a dead-end road without a plan and doomed to miss out on the life that you could have experienced. It’s time to choose what kind of life you are going to have. I believe it’s time for you to choose success.

This book will get you moving toward a more successful way of living. We will journey through seven secrets and arrive at the final destination, becoming a success seeker, a person who has mastered the seven secrets. A success seeker has learned how to find success every day and gone on to share it with others. The map outlined in Destination Success will guide you into living at a higher level, experiencing a better life than you previously imagined. As we partner together, I will challenge your thinking, especially on what lasting success means. Our goal is to achieve positive results in the areas of life that matter most to you.

The first part of our journey together is to discover more success in your life. I call the secrets contained in this part of our trip the success focus. We will flesh out a clear definition of what success looks like to you at this stage of life. These secrets will help you avoid spending your time and energy on activities that don’t move you toward the quality of life you desire. If your goal is to feel successful every day, you must master the ability to find success. Learning these secrets will help you do that.

Then we will partner together to discover success you thought was lost. This is the second part of Destination Success, where we will face and disarm your success fear. This area is the biggest roadblock to fulfillment of one’s dreams. The secrets in this section will guide you away from repeating a self-destructive pattern of behavior in your personal life or business. This is the most exciting part for me, because I will teach you how to stretch your old roadblocks into a new shape to become the bridge to a new level of success. Think of it! We are going to move beyond the mistakes to a new level of accomplishment in your business, finances, and personal relationships.

Most important is the third aspect, the success formula, where we will build some daily routines that, when practiced, will allow you to live out more success every single day. I have seen this formula work for thousands of people, and it will work for you as well. When you remove the roadblocks to success, you won’t find this formula difficult to apply. As you live out the seven secrets, you will not only be better equipped for success, you will begin to experience the quality of life that only success seekers experience. The good news is that the path is open and available to anyone who will take the journey to arrive at a destination called success!

Are you ready to move toward success?

Then let’s go!

PART 1

THE SUCCESS FOCUS

To laugh often and much;

To win the respect of intelligent people

and the affection of children,

To earn the appreciation of honest critics

and endure the betrayal of false friends;

To appreciate beauty,

To find the best in others,

To leave the world a bit better

whether by a healthy child, a garden patch,

or a redeemed social condition;

To know even one life has breathed easier

because you lived.

This is to have succeeded.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

ONE

Secret #1

DEFINING WHAT SUCCESS MEANS TO YOU

Success is a science. If you have the conditions, you get the results.

—Oscar Wilde

Fool’s gold is not what it seems. Many people seeking their fortune in the Old West were thrown off by the iron ore that glittered but wasn’t gold. They couldn’t spend it, because it was worthless. Many people have a concept of success that is like fool’s gold. They falsely believe that if you look successful, you are successful. I call that image management. They dress up, put on a happy face, and say, I’m fine. I’m just great! Instead of actually looking at their life and measuring what is most valuable, they adopt the philosophy of fake it till you make it. The problem is that they don’t know what make it is. Somewhere along the line they came to believe that success is simply having it all. While their lives may look like they have it all together both personally and professionally, what looks successful on the outside really isn’t. The saying All that glitters is not gold came from people who thought they had struck it rich when they found a bunch of shiny rocks. Likewise, our lives aren’t successful because of glitter.

Have you ever felt the pressure to work on the outside of the package instead of on the real and valuable gifts inside? It’s sort of like the bumper sticker that says, You Can Never Be Too Rich or Too Thin, implying that more wealth or extreme weight loss is the definition of success. While those things may be important, there is much more to success than the package. Picture it: You are exchanging gifts with a friend, and he or she hands you a beautiful, shiny jewelry box. Your hand trembles as you open it, only to discover that it is full of rocks; it is just a glittering box of rocks. That is like some people: They look successful on the outside but feel worthless on the inside. That’s not success.

I once saw in the weather department of a television station a sign that said, We have two classes of forecasters: those who don’t know and those who don’t know they don’t know. I suspect the same rule applies to success. A few people intuitively know they have some learning, growing, and developing to do, while the other group moves forward with a false sense of confidence because they have the look. They have the right clothes, right body size, right car, right house, right jewelry, right cologne, right friends, right job, right pet, even the right toothpaste! Deep down inside though, they know they’re a sham. They feel the extreme emptiness of a beautiful shell of a life that is really going nowhere.

The beaches of the barrier islands off the southwest coast of Florida illustrate this. Sanibel, Captiva, and Marco islands are nestled in the Gulf of Mexico and have some of the most exotic shells imaginable, with a few tropical species that cannot be found anywhere else in the world. Often the shells can be found in huge mounds several feet thick. They are beautiful shells with vibrant colors and amazing shapes, but when you find them on the beach, they aren’t living anymore. The previous occupants stopped growing, died, and washed up on shore. Their life is over, and they are only good for children to collect in sand buckets for decorations or craft projects. It is against federal law to take a living shell from the ocean environment, because living shells keep growing and moving, and they never wash up! You can take as many dead shells as you like, because they are worthless. Think about that again: The living ones keep growing and never wash up!

What about you? Do you feel washed up? Do you feel like an empty, lifeless shell? Are you just waiting for someone to pick you up and solve your problems?

If any of these questions stirred your thinking, good! On this journey toward our destination of a successful life, you will find areas of your life that are not growing at all. You also will discover some stable areas and likely some areas that are totally out of control that need immediate attention. The introspection of what is causing you to miss out on greater success may be uncomfortable at times, but honestly looking at your strengths and weaknesses is a vital part of gaining a healthy lifestyle. Mark Twain said, The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable. So get ready to feel miserable and then to feel great as you begin to live out a better life. We will tackle some huge problems that have been holding you back from success, but don’t panic. Just be honest about where you are, and then begin to set new goals toward successful life destinations.

Finding Success in Strange Places

Henry Ford once said, You cannot build a reputation on what you are going to do. Stories could be told of countless people who looked successful but never accomplished anything, while others whom you and I would have labeled with a big L for loser changed their corner of the world. Success isn’t always what it seems.

One of the best examples of this is the early failure and then incredible success of William Sydney Porter. Unless you paid attention in college English classes, you don’t know that name, so let me refresh your memory. He went to the Ohio state penitentiary for embezzlement, where he wrote fourteen stories in his prison cell. He is one of America’s favorite authors because of his powerful use of surprise endings mingled with a tremendous sense of human emotion. He wrote stories like The Last Leaf, The Ransom of Red Chief, and The Gift of the Magi, which firmly established him as a gifted storyteller. He wrote under the pen name of O. Henry, and when released from prison in 1901, he was one of the most sought-after writers of his day. He made bad decisions early in life, and one might have labeled him a loser because he was a convicted felon. But that judgment would have been wrong, for Porter has become known worldwide as one of the best short-story writers ever. Be careful that you don’t judge success by what people look like, what they have done, or by mistakes they have made. Success is sometimes hard to spot at first glance.