Top Ten Strategies For Becoming Uncommonly Successful

People who become uncommonly successful share many of the same traits. Here are the top ten strategies they use to overcome adversity and excel.

Here are 10 of 26 proven strategies gleaned from interviews with highly successful people who have overcome obstacles to accomplish such feats at climbing Mt. Everest, winning a Grammy, becoming a multi-millionaire, becoming an established author and humorist, a professional pitcher in the Major Leagues, an internet entrepreneur who earns millions and more. Regardless of your career or industry, when applied, these success principles can shorten your learning curve and be a catalyst for your success.

These principles were excerpted from the book, “I Can’t Believe I Get Paid To Do This!” Remarkable People Reveal 26 Proven Strategies For Making Your Dreams a Reality by Stacey Mayo.

1) Create Wealth in Alignment With Your Passions

It is important to focus on what you are passionate about first and then find a way to make money at it. Get in touch with your heart first, otherwise, the left side of your brain will rule out perfectly good ideas without having explored them.

“Money allows us the freedom to pursue the things that are important to us. Money is not an end it itself.” Stacy Allison, first American woman to successfully climb Mt. Everest

2) Honor Numero Uno: Design Your Life Around Your Priorities

Many people try to fit their dreams into their life and complain there are not enough hours in the day to make it happen. If you want your dream to become a reality, make it a priority. Otherwise, it will never be more than a pipedream.

3) Visualize Every Step of Your Dream and Watch the Magic Unfold

The muscle movement that helps us physically take action in our lives begins in the mind. That is why all great golfers, tennis players, basketball players, etc. visualize themselves making a shot beforehand. An experiment conducted by Alan Richardson, an Australian psychologist, found 23% performance improvement among subjects who visualized every day for 20 days. In his paper published in Research Quarterly, Richardson wrote that the most effective visualization occurs when the visualizer feels and sees what he is doing.

“I really visualized it, too, even as a child watching those programs. I could visualize myself walking up the stage, up the stairs. For me, visualizing those dreams happening was pertinent to making that happen, because I could see it. I pictured it in my head” Mary Youngblood, welfare mom turned Grammy Award Winner.

4) Easy Does It: Inspired Action Always Trumps Forced Action

Inspired action is joyful action that is in alignment with your dream. It is action you want to take and the idea of it brings a smile to your face. When you take inspired action, you are aligned with what you are doing and things flow naturally.

Contrast this to action that you are forcing yourself to take regardless of whether you feel like doing it. Maybe you are in a bad mood or have a headache but decide you have to take this action and keep trudging forward. The likelihood is that if you take action from this place it will take you twice as long to accomplish your task or goal or there will be obstacles that come up along the way. It’s like swimming against strong currents.

5) Laser in On One Idea, Business or Income Stream at a Time

One of the mistakes people make is diversifying too quickly. This is true whether you are trying to build multiple streams of income or are just working on several different ideas at one time. The key is getting the first stream or idea up and running, producing good revenue, and having systems in place so it will keep running without you before going on to the next unrelated stream.

“Several things going on at one time is a distraction to cash.” Loral Langemeier, single mom, financial literacy coach and millionaire

6) Strengthen Your Relationships: Your Financial Independence is Dependent on Your Connections With Others

Many people think of the day when they will be financially independent as “freedom day.” And, while financial independence is a worthwhile goal, it does not mean that you are free of your dependence on other people. As a matter of fact, in order to create financial independence, you just might need a lot more people in your life than you have right now.

7) Develop Your Resilience Muscle: Bounce Back From Setbacks

The truth is that you will have setbacks along the way. This is just inevitable. The sooner you accept that, the better. Many of these setbacks will take the form of circumstances that come up and block your way. If you look closely, you may find these setbacks are directly correlated with your innermost thoughts, fears, and limiting beliefs. This is because we create what we focus on including those things we don’t want.

Don’t get stopped by these bumps in the road; learn from them. As you work through the setbacks that come up, you will become the person you need to be to live out your dreams.

8) Streamline Your Efforts; Align Your Natural Talents With Your Goal

Success comes easier and more quickly when you enhance your strengths and delegate in areas where you are weak. Your natural talents are those things you do so easily and naturally that you think they are no big deal. Many of my clients were overlooking their natural talents when they first came to me. They thought if it is this easy for them, it must be this easy for everyone. This is rarely the case.

The key is to take your natural talents and abilities and strengthen them through education and experience. You are not born an expert at anything. It is something you develop.

9) Disarm That Sneaky Inner Saboteur

Even when we know what we need to do, we often don’t do it out of fear of experiencing the emotions and other things that may come up as a result. Fear of failure and fear of success are the two biggest internal fears that people often face. Most other fears such as fear of rejection fall underneath one of these major categories. As human beings, we will go to great lengths to avoid our fears. That is why so many ideas never get beyond being a great idea, or projects are started and never finished. It is easy to find reasons, excuses, other diversions or projects, create chaos, and sometimes to even create emergencies to avoid these negative feelings or outcomes.

One of the most important things you can do is allow it to be okay to have these feelings. Then step back and notice what it is you do to get in your own way. When you have identified what you do, you can make a conscious decision to do it differently.

10) Shorten Your Learning Curve by Learning From The Best

You can learn from the people who are barely getting by, from those who are doing fairly well or from those at the top of the heap. Talk to people who are already successful and find out how they did it. That’s what the book, “I Can’t Believe I Get Paid To Do This!” is about. Its purpose is to provide success principles and philosophies from those who have excelled. They’ve already been down the road and you can learn from their experience. Why reinvent the wheel when someone else already did a great job of creating it?

These principles were excerpted from the book I Can’t Believe I Get Paid To Do This! : Remarkable People Reveal 26 Proven Strategies For Making Your Dreams a Reality by Stacey Mayo.  Stacey is the director of The Center for Balanced Living. Visit her web site at www.IgetPaidToDoThis.com.