THE COMMON TRAITS OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE
DO
YOU HAVE A ROUTINE FOR FOCUS AND A FEELING OF CONNECTEDNESS IN YOUR
WORK? THESE GREAT INNOVATORS HAD THESE TRAITS IN COMMON.
What
makes someone ordinary become extraordinary? Is it their intellect or
good luck? Is it their charisma and leadership qualities? There’s
no definite formula, but there’s also no denying that there are
common traits that make successful people stand apart from everyone
else. There are ways of doing things and thinking about the world
that people at top just do differently.
Robert
Greene,
best-selling author of The
48 Laws of Power spends
a lot of time researching and interviewing the most successful
people. In his most recent book Mastery,
he analyzed the lives of those he called “masters” to pinpoint
their secret to greatness. Below Greene shares common things he
thinks successful people do differently.
THEY
ARE EMOTIONALLY COMMITTED
When
looking at the most successful people throughout history, Greene
found that it’s an emotional quality, not an intellectual one, that
separates them from everyone else.
“We
live in a culture that tends to really emphasize intellect and going
to the greatest schools and all that,” Greene tells Fast
Company,
but success is really more dependent on “a resiliency and a love of
what you’re doing.”
Since
intellect isn’t the core driving force for success, Greene says
that successful people won’t always show signs of great potential
in their early years. In Mastery,
Greene points to Charles
Darwin who,
as a youth, was always in the shadows of his cousin who had a much
higher IQ.
“Darwin
was a bit of a loser. His father thought he wouldn’t end up
amounting to much,” says Greene. “He kind of wandered around and
took this job on a boat sailing around the world and it ended up
Darwin became perhaps one of the greatest scientists who ever lived.
But at an early age, if you looked at him, you would say, ‘I don’t
see it there.’”
If
you don’t feel emotionally connected to your work, Greene suggests
looking within yourself. Keep a journal and think about the
experiences that really excited you. What do they have in common?
“If
you can’t look at what you like, what you don’t like, then it’s
pretty hopeless,” he says. “But I think most people generally
have up until the age of 50 and can go back and do this process.”
THEY
DON’T CARE TOO MUCH WHAT OTHERS THINK OF THEM
If
you’re going to follow your passion and put all of your energy into
your work, you can’t care too much about what others think of you.
So successful people don’t.
“Overall,
you have to have some level of connection to yourself,” says
Greene. “You have to know what makes you different. What you love,
what you don’t love.”
“Some
people have a hard time with that. They listen so much to other
people. They’re on Facebook all the time. They’re so concerned
with what other people are thinking that they have no relationship to
themselves and what they really love.”
But
successful people revere their individuality. If you look at the ones
at the top, “they’re one of a kind,” says Greene. “Their
business reflects their weirdness, they’re uniqueness.”
THEY
DON’T LET THEIR BRAIN GET RIGID
The
worst thing you can do to your career—and your life—is to allow
your brain to get stale, says Greene. This is when you start thinking
about and doing your work in a way that doesn’t spark creativity or
inspire innovation. There are ways you can loosen up the rigidity
that happens, especially when you get older. Greene advises
developing an interest in a study of science or literature.
“Spend
some free time delving into this new field that interests you but is
not directly related to what you do,” he says. “That will kind of
give you ideas and give you perspective that you don’t normally get
from reading the Wall
Street Journal and
listening to your colleagues. You need outside sources of
information.”
In
almost all fields, the greatest innovators are those who came from
outside of the industry they transformed because they’re able to
think differently and aren’t tied down by “conventions and
dogmas," says Greene.
THEY
KNOW WHEN TO TURN OFF THEIR PHONE
With
everything that’s fighting for our attention every minute of every
day, the ones who get things done are the people who can focus. One
of the biggest distractions that keep our attention is our phone,
says Greene, so successful people separate themselves from their
phones.
“I
have noticed that a lot of the people I’ve interviewed are able to
not get too distracted. In other words, they’re able to focus more
than others,” he explains. “They know how to turn off
their smartphones.”
“I
remember that I was interviewing Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator
in Silicon Valley, he didn’t even have a smartphone.
I’ve found a couple of other people who are like that. So they’re
not people who get lost in all of the information glut.”
THEY
HAVE A FOCUS ROUTINE
Steve
Jobs once said that
the only thing that separates him from other people is the ability to
focus.
“He
would close his door and not let other people in,” says Greene.
That was his focus routine. How he was able to shut out the rest of
the world. Anyone who wants to accomplish something great, needs to
be able to do the same.
For
Greene, the author focuses by meditating 30 minutes every morning.
He’s been doing it for over four years and says it’s “the
greatest thing” he could recommend to anyone.
“Basically,
it slows everything down. You find that you don’t react to
everything that goes on around you,” says Greene. “It’s very
calming and in the heat of the moment while other people are getting
excited, I don’t know why, but somehow, it changes something in
your brain where you’re not so reactive to everything.”
Greene
says he’s able to look at situations in front of him with “a bit
of a distance” and has an easier time knowing what matters and what
doesn’t. His trick is to to empty his mind to get rid of useless
distractions, but meditation itself is “not easy and is a struggle
every single day when you sit down to do it.”
“You
only have so much energy in life, mental
energy.
If all of these things in your day-to-day affairs are weighing you
down, bothering you, creating anxiety, and making you insecure, it’s
draining a lot of that valuable time that could be spent for creative
focus,” he explains.
THEY
DON’T LIVE IN THEIR PAST SUCCESSES
Once
you start getting used to your successes, you’ll start taking it
for granted. You want to stay in a familiar, comfortable place
instead of push yourself when you feel that frustration that often
comes before the brink of greatness.
“I
find a lot of writers, their books tend to resemble one another,”
says Greene. “They’re not challenging themselves. I don’t like
that attitude. I don’t want to live in my past success. I want my
next book to be even more successful.”
To
continuously challenge himself, Greene says he starts every new book
with “the
assumption that [he] can easily fail and no one
will read this book.” That fear allows him to work “like a fiend
to make it successful.”
No
one was born an expert or a master of something. You may be the
smartest person in the world, but if you don’t know what drives you
or can’t seem to focus, you won’t get anything done. According to
Greene, the most important thing for success is finding something
that you feel emotionally committed to. The most successful people
are usually not chasing money when they decide on their craft because
“money isn’t the greatest motivator in the world,” he says.
BY
VIVIAN
GIANG
http://www.fastcompany.com/3038843/the-common-traits-of-the-most-successful-people?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=fast-company-daily-manual-newsletter&position=anjali&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=11212014
