The Art of Deliberate Success

The 10 Behaviours of Successful People

David Keane

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781118487648, 9781118487754
• eBook ISBN: 9781118487761
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Small Business
• Index: Business

An effective framework for professional and personal success

Everyone wants to succeed in life, but not everyone knows how. Success isn't just a result of luck and hard work; you also need to know how to define success for yourself and put yourself in the right frame of mind to achieve it. Based on a powerful ten-part framework, The Art of Deliberate Success presents ten chapters that help you identify strengths and weaknesses so you can focus your attention and effort where it matters most.

The book includes an online self-assessment tool that helps you pinpoint the areas you need to focus on, followed by chapters dedicated to helping you focus on what matters, using language more effectively, mastering your behaviour, getting things done, and ultimately reach your goals.

• Based on the author's 24 years of professional experience and research
• Presents a flexible and effective system that allows you to achieve goals that are professional or personal in nature
• Features a special online self-assessment tool for identifying strengths and weaknesses and personalising your self-development

Informal, easy-to-read, and highly effective, The Art of Deliberate Success is the ideal guide for professionals who want to reach new heights and stay there.

1
Decide — what's important

The purpose of life is to live a life of purpose.

— RICHARD LEIDER

As I begin to write this chapter, Iam looking up at the framed quotation on the wall over my desk. The quotation reads:

When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds; your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.

— PATANJALI

As far as we know, Patanjali lived almost 2500 years ago in India where he led a simple life as a mystic and philosopher. I really like this quotation because, for me, it shows the great power in having a clear purpose to your life. Just imagine your consciousness expanding in every direction and dormant forces becoming alive in you. It's wonderfully motivating and inspiring.

Now here is the most amazing — and tragic — thing: most people are unclear about their main purpose in life. They live what I call ‘lives of drift’, where they simply go from one day to the next, doing the same old thing in the same old way, and then wondering why their lives are so boring or why they never make any progress towards what they really want to do. Some may even have dreams of their future, but generally these dreams are so vague or unrealistic that they cause people to be disheartened even before they begin to make progress. The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to help you become crystal clear about what is important to you. But before we begin this process, it is useful to consider why so many people do not take the time to clarify their real objectives in life.

Brian Tracy, who in the course of more than 30 years has helped more than four million people clarify their goals, estimates that only 2 per cent of people in the developed world have a clearly defined sense of purpose. Based on my own experience, I agree with Tracy's assessment. The interesting aspect to consider is why, and there are three basic reasons: lack of knowledge, lack of know-how, and fear.

The first of these, lack of knowledge, is to do with not understanding how a clearly defined purpose can affect every area of your life. When we are clear about what is important to us, we begin to notice new things. People and opportunities that we might not have noticed before suddenly become relevant and of interest to us. As a child, you may have played that game where you counted cars of a specific colour — say, yellow — as a way of passing the time on a journey. When playing that game, your attention was on yellow and even from afar you could identify that colour on cars or trucks coming out of side roads. Now the interesting point here is that after the game, if you were asked how many blue cars passed your way, you would have been stumped. It's the same way with your life: being clear about what you're looking for and what really matters focuses your attention on the right things and, moreover, prevents you from missing opportunities that may have been staring you in the face all along.

In other words, when you are clear about your purpose, your attention becomes focused in a way that allows you to identify opportunities as they emerge in your life. You can recognise these for what they are — fantastic chances to move closer to where you actually want to be. This phenomenon has been well documented for centuries, and some of the most successful people in history have applied this ‘secret’ to their lives. According to one classic book, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill (originally published in 1937), the key to success is ‘definiteness of purpose’. As Hill so beautifully puts it, ‘what the mind can conceive, and believe, it can achieve’.

In more recent times, Rhonda Byrne's book and movie The Secret has repackaged these fundamental ideas for the modern era. Byrne strongly makes the point that by being clear you invoke the Law of Attraction — ‘what you think about, you bring about’ — and begin to make it work for rather than against you. While Byrne's book and movie have received a mixed response (some critics have argued that her approach is too simplistic and too materialistic) she has nonetheless awakened interest in the considerable power of merely thinking about what it is you are trying to achieve.

To be clear about your life purpose is to discover a solid point of reference for day-to-day decision making. That is, you have a way of assessing value as different opportunities and challenges come your way. Without this clarity, everything is equally unimportant and, therefore, being decisive is extremely challenging and stressful. With life purpose clarity, you have a mental compass to help and guide you.

The second reason why you may lack clarity about your life purpose is that you simply may not know how to arrive at that clarity. This chapter will change all that! In my experience, the task of clarifying is a process rather than an instantaneous event. It's not just a question of taking ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• About the author
• Prologue — living by choice,not by chance
• The Deliberate Quotient (DQ)® Quiz
• 1 Decide — what’s important
• 2 Eliminate — focusing on the important
• 3 Language — your internal soundtrack
• 4 Information — managing inward and outward flows
• 5 Beliefs — guiding your behaviour
• 6 Energy — synchronising your body and mind
• 7 Responsibility — accepting and taking ownership
• 8 Action — getting work done
• 9 Time — achieving your priorities
• 10 Evaluate — managing your overall performance
• Epilogue — living with success
• Recommended reading
• My story
• Acknowledgements and gratitude
• Index
• End User License Agreement