The Greatness Guide: One of the World's Most Successful Coaches Shares His Secrets for Personal and Business Mastery

by Robin Sharma

Do anything long enough and you’ll get some depth of insight and understanding about it.

I challenge my clients to dream, to shine and to dare, because to me a life well lived is all about reaching for your highest and your best. And, in my mind, the person who experiences the most wins.

Each day, life will send you little windows of opportunity. Your destiny will ultimately be defined by how you respond to these windows of opportunity.

Life’s just too short to play little.

nothing fails like success.

You, as well as your organization, are most vulnerable when you are most successful. Success actually breeds complacency, inefficiency and—worst of all—arrogance. When people and businesses get really successful, they often fall in love with themselves. They stop innovating, working hard, taking risks and begin to rest on their laurels. They go on the defensive, spending their energy protecting their success rather than staying true to the very things that got them to the top.

When you’re making money and good margins, you tend to get sloppy.

more successful you and your organization become, the more humble and devoted to your customers you need to be.

Being wildly passionate about your To Do’s. Being breathtakingly committed to your big projects and best opportunities. Being a rock star in whatever you do each day to put bread on your table.

Being great at what you do isn’t just something you do for the organization you work for—it’s a gift you give yourself.

when you bring your highest talents and deepest devotion to the work you do, what you are really doing is setting yourself up for a richer, happier and more fulfilling experience of living.

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or as Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’”

As you live your days, so you craft your life. What you do today is actually creating your future.

reading a book by someone you respect allows some of their brilliance to rub off on you.

A mind once stretched by a new idea can never return to its original dimensions.

if you want to lead, you really need to read.

Failure is the price of greatness. Failure is an essential ingredient for a high achievement.

You can’t win without leaving your safety zone and taking some calculated risks. No risk, no reward.

The most successful people on the planet have failed more than ordinary ones.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did.

Making the time to think is a superb strategy for success at leadership and in life.

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

By thinking more, you will have a better sense of your priorities and what you need to focus on.

More time thinking will make you less reactive.

ordinary people don’t spend much time on the extra mile. But who ever said you were ordinary?

Positive reference points will pull you into a new way of seeing things and introduce you to a new set of possibilities. Doors you never even knew existed will begin to open.

You will play a bigger game as a human being if you pick the right people to model. We are all cut from the same cloth. We are all flesh and bones. If they can get to greatness—so can you.

It’s easy to forget that people do business with people they like—and who make them feel good.

Too many among us are afraid to be ourselves. So we give up our dreams to follow the crowd.

The things that get scheduled are the things that get done. Until you schedule something, it’s only a concept—and extraordinary people don’t build remarkable lives on concepts.

“The harder I work, the luckier I get.” Life helps those who help themselves.

Not one of the über-successful people I’ve worked with as a leadership coach got there without outworking everyone around them.

behind extraordinary achievement you will always discover extraordinary effort. Just a law of nature. Hasn’t changed for a thousand years.

Whatever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

Hard work opens doors and shows the world that you are serious about being one of those rare—and special—human beings that uses the fullness of their talents for the highest and the very best.

Focus on any area or skill with a relentless devotion to daily improvement and a passion for excellence and within three to five years, you will be operating at a level of competence (and insight) such that people call you a genius. Focus plus daily improvement plus time equals genius.

One of the most important of all personal leadership skills is self-awareness. Know what you are really great at. Reflect on those abilities that others admire in you.

Find your genius points and then develop them. Focus plus daily improvement plus time. Start today and in three to five years people will be writing about you. Calling you a genius. Celebrating your magnificence.

Listening intently to someone is one of the best ways I know of to honor that person and forge a deep human connection. When you listen to someone—not just with your mind but with every fiber of your being—it sends them a message: “I value what you have to say, and I’m humble enough to listen to your words.” So few of us are really good at listening.

Never talk when you can nod.

If you’re in business, one of the most important things I suggest that you consider is the idea that people don’t buy with their heads so much as with their hearts.

Touch the hearts of the people you serve and they’ll be back for more. Engage their emotions and they’ll become your raving fans. Miss this insight and you just might lose your business.

Human beings move when their emotions are moved.

Business is in so many ways about love. Think about it. Success comes by treating your customers with love. Acclaim comes by doing your job with love. Market leadership comes with selling your wares with love.

Every time you say yes to something that is unimportant, you say are no to something that is important.

You can’t be all things to all people. The best among us get that. Know your priorities. Know your goals. Know what needs to get done over the coming weeks, months and years for you to feel that you played your best game as a human being. And then say no to everything else.

Great achievement often happens when our backs are up against the wall. Pressure can actually enhance your performance.

Challenge serves beautifully to introduce you to your best—and most brilliant—self.

Diamonds get formed through intense pressure. And remarkable human beings get formed by living from a frame of reference that tells them they just have to win.

The Leader is based on a simple yet powerful concept: The ultimate competitive advantage of your enterprise comes down to a single imperative—your ability to grow and develop leaders faster than your competition.