Napoleon Hill's Success Masters

by Napoleon Hill

  Sense of Self

  Self-improvement begins with a keen awareness of who you are, your values, beliefs, and the larger purpose you wish to pursue. True satisfaction can only manifest from chasing your own dreams. Life, people, and business can be hard and insensitive, so remind yourself that you are more than the sum total of other people’s opinions and continue pursuing what is meaningful to you.

  The experiences you have in life can only have true meaning when you seek to understand them. To become a pristine student of life is to always remain teachable-ready. Examine how each experience life brings can be used for greater self-knowledge and better decisions going forward. As you gain a more solid sense of who you are, you become ready to start planning, designing, and pursuing your goals and objectives.

  Sense of Curiosity

  To live successfully, be endlessly curious about all the possibilities your future holds. It is important to have an unquenchable thirst for your advancement and for adventure. Curiosity inspires you to push through the unusually painful trials and errors in your life and business. This type of resiliency is an acquired self-discipline that teaches you to cast your fears aside, bringing you the fullest experience of the adventures success can bring.

  Curiosity creates a longing to know more and do more. It inspires that energy that makes it possible to see all situations as opportunities for your advancement. When you approach life and business with a sense of adventure, there is no situation, however limiting, physically or economically, which cannot be filled to the brim with the interest and curiosity of how it will all work out.

  Without a sense of curiosity, it is impossible to grow.

  Sense of Direction

  The more you develop yourself, the more pristine you become in achieving what you want. This clarity makes decision making easier because having a direction improves your ability to prioritize. You know which objectives are important in the short term and which are necessary for your long term. With a sense of direction, you become focused and effective.

  There is nothing more organizing to an effort than being focused. Direction provides commitment. It is difficult to commit to something that has no foreseeable future or path. If you are filled with doubt and a lack of clarity, there is no way to launch your ideas. Self-development gives you direction, and thereby, the commitment to achieve your ends.

  Sense of Follow-Through

  Knowing what you want to achieve makes it easier for you to see the benefits of taking action. Even when the tasks at hand are not enjoyable, seeing the benefit of following through on them will make it easier to motivate yourself into taking the necessary actions to achieve your goals. There is a lot of truth in the saying “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

  When you are committed to personal development, you always find a way to develop the necessary will. Your idea of success and the vision of what that will look like is where you grab your incentive to always follow through.

  Sense of Urgency

  A sense of urgency drives inspiration. Urgency creates the mindset to work as if your life depends on it, especially if you have fewer resources than others. When you are the underdog, you will dig deep inside yourself for the advances you need to thrive.

  Urgency causes you to activate quickly when making decisions. You get out of your routine and do something different. It motivates you to get results quickly and efficiently, but it does not eliminate assessment. If you want to produce results faster, you must assess what is and what is not working, then eliminate the efforts that have been identified as wasteful. Keep in mind it is easier to steer a moving object, so if you realize you have made a poor decision, a sense of urgency allows you to adjust. If you wait too long, you miss opportunities and chances.

  Sense of Resiliency

  There will be tough times in life and business. When tough times occur, you need the skills and attributes to deal effectively with them. Personal development cannot prevent all bad things from occurring, but it helps you deal with obstacles as they surface.

  Resiliency teaches you never to view any challenge as the end of the world. Resiliency allows you the patience, awareness, and fortitude to continue moving forward, even if that means completely changing course.

  Self-development deepens your maturity to trust that everything happens for reasons that can only be in line with your best interest. With this type of mindset, there is no obstacle that will hold you back. You will have greater confidence, pliability, and the personal and interpersonal skills to cope with any obstacle you face to climb up the ladder of success.

  Sense of Connectedness

  Relationships can be double-edged swords. They either lift you up or drag you down. They either bring you closer to your goals or push you further away. When you improve your personal development, you are better able to see which relationships and partnerships are worth investing in and which you need to cut loose. This type of self-awareness gives you the skills to make the best of the relationships that have a positive impact on your life, your business, and your overall success.

  If you aren’t learning, then you aren’t living. Make the commitment to invest in your greatest resource—you. Many people are put off by personal development because it’s viewed as a weakness or something that shows you do not already possess the skills necessary for success. If you assume you already have it all, you will not be happy or successful. The greatest achievers in life and business know the key to success is their ability to manage themselves in a variety of situations. That ability comes through personal development.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Action Plan for Success: Your Psychological Needs

  Dr. Lacy Hall

  Dr. Lacy Hall (1934–2014) led an accomplished life. He received his master’s degree in philosophy from Duke University and his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of North Carolina. He served as a professor at a number of American universities. A prolific writer and lecturer, he specialized in testing and analyzing personality traits and developing measures of self-assessment. In addition to his years of educational work at universities, he was a director of counseling for the Peace Corps, director for employment counseling for the State of North Carolina and director of testing for the U.S. Armed Services.

  The following “Action Plan for Success” provides guidance on how you can assess your capabilities and interests and use this knowledge to set and achieve your goals.

  IDENTIFY YOUR NEEDS

  We all have needs. We are all very much aware of the various physical needs that we face. For example, if we do not get enough sleep or do not get enough to eat, we become aware that our physical-needs satisfaction is being neglected, and we can decide what has to be done to correct it.

  So in the same way we want to satisfy our physical needs, we look for the satisfaction of psychological needs; we respond to others and to ourselves psychologically. There are certain basic psychological needs such as a need to be loved, to be recognized, and so forth, that are important for you to be aware of in this process towards your successful future.

  Abraham Maslow has done an outstanding job in his observation on the fulfillment of needs in our lives and how we respond to these needs. He came to his awareness as he worked with those people who were considered to be very successful and had reached some fulfillment or self-actualization in their lives as he identified it. He wanted to identify those characteristics used in their lives that made them function as successful persons. As a result of this, Maslow developed a concept that there is a hierarchy of needs in all of our lives.

  ENTREPRENEUR TIP

  Take a moment to make a list of what you think your basic needs are. How do you think they differ from those of someone in another region, another state, or even another continent?

  This hierarchy starts off with the very basic need of staying alive. This includes having enough to eat and drink, avoiding bodily harm, and having adequate shelter.

  Now the interesting thing is that to m
any of us in our land these days, these very basic needs have not been a real challenge. We have taken them for granted. But to others, these have been and continue to be an ongoing challenge. There are people in developing countries, for example. They’re not always sure that they are going to stay alive or have enough to eat and drink. Thus, Maslow is saying that before we try to help a person become self-actualized, which is at the top of your list, we must first see that these very basic needs are satisfied in their life.

  However, for many, these basic needs have not been changed and therefore are not important to you. But what is important to you is that you are able to live a satisfying and fulfilling life and that your needs (either staying alive or doing what you want to do) are met and placed in their proper perspective. The challenge as we have found it, is that most of us have tried by hit or miss to determine what these needs are.

  There is a systematic way to determine what needs have been fulfilled and what have not been fulfilled in your life. Thus, let’s change your attitude about the fulfilling of your needs. We are not going to explore the negative past as we mentioned. The negative past does not have to be explored in order to change the present or to alter the future. Thus, we want to look at the positive or the helpful side of your needs and your life.

  CREATE A NEEDS INVENTORY

  Look at those needs that have been fulfilled as you have been fulfilled. Select eight different experiences, each illustrating an experience where things worked together or have been fulfilled, where you thought that at that moment and through that experience that life is the way it should be, and it was a very wonderful and meaningful time for you.

  ENTREPRENEUR TIP

  Take a moment to list the seminal experiences that have made you who you are as an entrepreneur. What are your successes? Do you see a pattern in them?

  Now, by using this definition as just suggested, this could mean many things to many different people. We are not trying to say that this meaningfulness or being fulfilled at a moment [in time] is the same for everyone. Your feelings are similar, but the events producing the feelings will be very different for each person. At this point, just think about the experiences that have happened in your life, that helped you to feel that all was well with the world, and that this was a wonderful day or a wonderful experience or series of experiences. Be as specific as you can and list these in eight columns on a sheet of paper or in a journal.

  For example, we suggest that you list a very specific event, rather than something that’s too general such as a family or job. All of us have to be honest—we may have had families that haven’t been as fulfilling or as wonderful as others. But parts of them have and we have to look at the good side of some of these things. So now, let’s pick a specific event in your life when you had a very fulfilling and rewarding experience. For example, were you on a specific type of trip? What happened on that trip? Were you on a picnic or is it a time when you were seated around the Christmas tree and having a discussion with your family? Now take that specific event; for example, the day you sat by the Christmas tree and talked about meaningful things with your family. Why was this particular event that you have selected meaningful or fulfilling to you?

  Now, identify the needs that are important to you, and to write them down on the left hand side of the page. We suggest that the first two be “I was doing what I wanted to do,” and “I was doing things the way they should be done.” because these are critical needs for many people. You should select your own most important needs, however, and list them in this column. List as many as you believe are important to your success and happiness.

  After you have entered an experience at the top of the first column, go down the left side and ask yourself: Was sitting about the Christmas tree, this particular experience, meaningful to me because it was doing what I wanted to do? If so, then place a check in the column. Was it doing things the way I thought they should be done? Then check. In other words, check off each of the statements that have helped you to decide if this was a meaningful experience in explaining it to you.

  Now it could be that as you’ve gone down this first column, you would have checked five or six items. Then, while you are still reflecting on this first column, review these items that you have checked. Decide which seem to be the most important to you and put a circle around that one check. Then go to the second column and repeat the same process with a new experience that you have listed at the top.

  Take a random sample of experiences from your family life, your business life, from association with friends, recreation, and so forth so that you could get a feeling of life in general for you.

  Now as you go through the same process with each experience, ask yourself each of the questions you’ve created and circle the most important mark in each column. When you have finished the eight columns, you will have a composite of your psychological needs. You are saying that when these eight representative events have happened in your life, you have felt wonderfully together and fulfilled, that these are the needs that were fulfilled and which now help you to explain why these events were important to you.

  TAKE ACTIONS THAT HONOR YOUR NEEDS

  Hey, you have taken a wonderful first step. You are now saying that when you have been fulfilled, there are some needs that have made this possible. It could be that you were able to do what you wanted to do or you were able to learn some new things. But this is very important as a contribution that you have now made to yourself, because you are saying that when you have been successful, these are the psychological needs that have helped to explain how or why you have been successful. This means that as you look towards planning your future success, you would want to make sure that these are a part of your plan.

  For example, if you like to do things the way you want to do them or if you want to learn new things or if you want to use skill and know-how, certainly as you look to planning your future success, you want to make sure that these are included in your activities.

  Don’t get yourself trapped in a situation where you can’t learn new things if you’re saying that every time you looked at yourself being fulfilled in the past, it was because you had learned something new. Don’t get yourself into a position where you routinely go through the same thing day after day without learning something new and then you can’t explain your boredom. If this is the case, you can now look and say, I can now see that I haven’t been learning anything new; no wonder I’m upset.

  Connect Your Strengths and Needs

  Now, take the four or five needs from your list and write them on a new page. Add your list of needs to that page as well. Then, take some time to reflect on your personal strengths. Select five or six strengths that you feel are important to your functioning as a total person. As you look at the two columns of strengths and needs, study possible ways of combining your strengths and your needs so that you can now write a definition of success for yourself. In other words, you can say, “I am successful when I use these strengths and when I meet these needs.” Now this isn’t always easy; perhaps you have never thought of yourself in this way, but combine these two very important facets of your life; and you are saying at the present time, in the present state of growth, “I feel successful when I am able to use these strengths and to meet these needs.”

  Now why is this important? It is important because by using these strengths and meeting these needs, you have now established where you are as of now. Remember, we talked about how in order to get to where you want to be, you must decide where you are right now. You are saying what your definition of success is and you’ve written it out. Now it may be that you may not like the way this definition reads. This is a definition that has come out of what you have said your strengths are and what you have shared your needs are. And whether you like this or not, the important thing to understand is that you can do something about it. In light of what we have now looked at in our personal definition of success, let’s do something about it, either to reinforce it or to cha
llenge ourselves to change it towards the future in the way we want to be successful.

  Set Goals

  Now this is where we set goals. A goal is deciding what you are going to accomplish today, tomorrow, next year, or maybe even five years from now. The goal is a decision on your part of an accomplishment or an achievement that you want to have completed and by a certain date. Thus, you are now saying, “In light of my definition of success, here is what I want to do to be a better salesperson, to become president of my company, to be a better husband or wife; this is my goal.”

  Once you have decided what your definition of success is, then you can begin to decide which goals you want to pursue. Now using this definition of success, you may want to change a goal. If it means changing yourself, your goal will help you make that decision as to the type of change you would like to make.

  Now, one suggestion. Remember: Don’t keep the goals too general; be as specific as you can. Is your goal conceivable, believable, achievable, controllable, measurable, desirable, stated with no alternatives, or growth-facilitating? Perhaps one thing you need to do is to reinforce something that you learned about yourself. To reinforce it is to make it stronger. So, you would want to set a goal to reinforce something about your definition of success or your strengths or your needs or some action.

  Next, you may want to set a second goal; a goal to challenge the future, to enlarge the parameters of your life, or to open up new directions and new vistas for you. This would be a goal of new growth potentials in your life. Perhaps you want to explore some new type of marketing, a new type of selling, or whatever it might be. Your second goal might be to move in a new direction or redefining success or redirecting your life towards this new successful future that you are clarifying right now.