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When people are looking down the barrel of failure in their lives, they will do whatever it takes to get themselves moving, something, anything, to start climbing upward toward the point of survival. And then, once they get to the point where they’re keeping their heads above water, they start heading back down again. As they start getting close enough to the failure line that they can see it coming, they go, “Whoops, I’m headed towards failure!” and then they do whatever it takes to turn their trajectory around and start heading back up … and the cycle repeats.
what I gradually realized was that the very same activities that had rescued me from failure, that had carried me from the failure line up to the survival line, would also rescue me from average and carry me from the survival line to the success line—if I would just keep doing them.
As soon as we get away from failure and up past the line of survival, we quit doing the things that got us there.
you already know how to do everything it takes to make you an outrageous success. That’s how you’ve survived up to this point. And if you can survive, then you can succeed. You don’t need to do some brilliant, impossible thing. You don’t need to learn some insanely difficult skills, or have some genius-level brainstorm of an innovative idea. All you have to do is keep doing the things that got you this far. Which is exactly what 99.9 percent of people don’t do.
The things that take you out of failure and up toward survival and success are simple. So simple, in fact, that it’s easy to overlook them. Extremely easy to overlook them. It’s easy to overlook them because when you look at them, they seem insignificant. They’re not big, sweeping things that take huge effort. They’re not heroic or dramatic. Mostly they’re just little things you do every day and that nobody else even notices. They are things that are so simple to do—yet successful people actually do them, while unsuccessful people only look at them and don’t take action.
Little things that seem insignificant in the doing, yet when compounded over time yield very big results.
The same activities that take us from failure to survival would also take us from survival to success—if we would just keep doing them.
You have complete control over the direction that the rest of your life takes.
No matter how much information there is, and no matter how good that information is, if the person consuming it doesn’t have the right catalyst, the catalyst that will allow them to apply that information effectively, then success will still elude their grasp.
If you’ve ever been told, “You’ll get it if you just want it bad enough,” I’m here to let you off the hook: it simply isn’t true. Just wanting something doesn’t necessarily get it for you, not even when you combine wanting with trying really hard and working really hard. You can want all you want, and try yourself blue in the face. But it still won’t happen—not without the first ingredient.
Your philosophy is what you know, how you hold what you know, and how it affects what you do. You can look at anyone’s actions and trace back, through the attitudes behind those actions, to their source: the philosophy behind the attitudes.
