Success Habits For Dummies

Dirk Zeller

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781119508847
• eBook ISBN: 9781119508854
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Discover the ultimate success habits for a healthy and prosperous life

Whether we like it or not, a big part of what we do in life is governed by habits. Even more importantly, habits can lead us to think and feel in certain patterns. Since habits are so powerful, it's worth paying attention to the ones that are most effective. Inside, bestselling author Dirk Zeller provides tried-and-true advice on creating, building, and cultivating winning habits to achieve success.

Success Habits For Dummies is a gold mine of startling insights and practical pointers on achieving success. No matter what your station in life, it can quickly put you on the road to the success you want and deserve. With wit, warmth, and loads of practical wisdom, Dirk Zeller helps you:

• Discover how habits determine 95% of a person's behavior
• Get to know how the people who achieve most in life take deliberate steps to ensure their goals are met
• Make a practical plan to perform at your maximum potential
• Maintain a growth mindset that makes you capable of change

Everything that you are today, and everythingthat you will ever accomplish, isdetermined by the quality of the habits that you form. By creating good habits and adopting a positive behavior, you too can become successful and live a prosperous life.

Part 1

Principles and Formulas for Success

IN THIS PART …

Get familiar with the formula for success.

Learn success from the successful people around you.

Discover discipline’s role in the achievement of success in life.

Chapter 1

Success Is a Habit

IN THIS CHAPTER

Defining success for yourself

Creating the habit of success

Staying on track

The pursuit of success is not new. People for all ages have been trying to unlock the mysteries of human behavior, peak performance, and success. Why is it that some people seem to, at first observation, achieve success easily while others try but repeatedly fall short? Just about everyone has the desire to improve their lives, but only a few of us actually achieve it.

Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence therefore is not an act, but a habit.” He was using success interchangeably with excellence. While you might define them differently, they must be thought of as close cousins. Aristotle studied and wrote about success until his death in 322 BC. The big picture in this quote is the connection between repeatedly doing something and the establishment of a habit. The conclusion is that you can create the habit of success or you can create the habit of failure.

Success, or excellence, will always be created through establishing positive, repetitive habits. Unfortunately, almost anything we do repeatedly can lose its luster, passion, and energy. Without doing something repeatedly, you won’t establish it as a habit. When you focus on repeating the actions that lead to success, you create habits. So repeating and success are like peas and carrots: They go together. There is always a yin and a yang in the pursuit of success. Right actions repeatedly done create habits and guarantees success. That would be the yin. The yang would be not engaging in the right actions repeatedly over time, creating bad habits that guarantee failure.

We all will create habits in either direction in life. The establishment of our habits is inevitable. We are the ultimate arbiters of what those habits will be. First, we will create our habits, and then our habits will create us.

In this chapter, I will describe success from a number of different angles. My desire is to start you off with the broad brush strokes and give you a little background scenery. In subsequent chapters, we’ll approach the painting with finer brushes and explore more specific aspects of the beautiful landscape of success habits.

What Is Success?

Success is many things to different people. We all have our own personal and unique definition of what success is to us. The dictionary defines success as the fact of getting or achieving wealth, respect, or fame. It also defines success as the correct or desired result of an attempt. I feel those two definitions capture the essence and objectives of success. Earl Nightingale, who is called “The Dean” of the personal motivation industry, describes with a twist: Success as the progressive realization of a worthy goal or worthy ideal.

Too many of us attach the moniker of success to the end result of achieving success: the achievement of the purchase of a new Mercedes, the finish line of becoming a millionaire, our kids graduating high school or college, or the corner office in the company. Mr. Nightingale brings a new perspective to success through the word “progressive.” As long as you are progressing toward a predetermined goal, you are in fact a success. What is most important is not how I define success. I can certainly add ideas, insight, and guidance in your journey to achieving of success. What is more important and personal is how you define success for your life.

• Success is you as a business owner providing valuable service to your clients, and that you enjoy helping your clients and customers. You go home content in the fact that you did a good job for each person you served, delivered value to, and treated with honesty.
• Success is that you went home to meaningful relationships with people you love. You have community, communication, and fun with those loved ones. You have people you love and who love you.
• Success is having interests that bring you joy, whether that is a serving opportunity at church, the community center, or a homeless shelter. A recreational interest creates success, whether that’s golf, pickle ball, hunting, fishing, mountain biking, or more sedentary interests like painting or knitting.
• Success is the feeling of security you have when you sit down to pay bills each month and there are funds left over. What you are doing in that moment is increasing your assets and reducing your liabilities. You are taking a few steps more toward financial security.
• Success, at the end of the day, is being grateful as you turn out the lights. You are grateful to people who have helped you today or whom you have been able to help and serve.

What Isn’t Success?

The biggest isn’t of success is failing to define it for yourself, as a couple, or as a family. It’s easy to get sidetracked or pursue someone else’s definition of success. Our brains are bombarded with images of success in social media, the news, the television, or even in the parent drop-off lane at school. We can’t avoid seeing Sally’s new Porsche or her daughter’s new designer clothes. Or we notice that Amy looks so tan and rested after her family’s trip to Barbados.

Observe others to encourage and remind yourself of what is possible. Don’t observe to compare or keep score. The truth is, the only score card that matters is yours.

Being successful is granting grace to yourself and others when the achievement you desire takes a little while longer than you expected. I had a coaching call recently with a wonderful client, Sandy. Her goal was to sell enough homes to make $250,000. She had a challenging year because she and her business partner decided to end the partnership. There was a lot of drama to say the least. We were reviewing what she had earned and what was still to be collected in income, and we came to the realization she would not make her $250,000 goal. When that fact was confirmed, she didn’t feel very successful. Frequently, our timeline for success can be slightly off. In reviewing her sales numbers, I ventured that her sales in escrow that were set to close by the middle of January would put her at that $250,000 mark. So she missed her goal, but she only missed it by two weeks. In the overall scheme of things, that's nothing.

The Only Thing That’s Important: What Success Is to You

Success is personal. It’s a personal experience of well-being, confidence, and accomplishment. That is why you must decide what success is for you. We all have wishes to lose weight, save more money, and improve our relationships. But success is not in the wish business. It’s in the desire, habit, and commitment business. The do it or else business. A wish has not morphed into desire, where you are willing to lay everything on the line to achieve it. It doesn't come with the resolve that causes you to say to yourself, “I will do it or else.” In order for you or I to achieve success, we must have desire for something and a big enough reason why we desire it.

You are in control of what you desire or wish. We all have the authority and power to decide what we want and then determine our motivation level to achieve it. You need to have clarity about what’s important to you and who’s important to you. What legacy you want to leave is the process of refining your definition of success.

Too many people get caught up in the how of reaching success or even a specific benchmark or goal of success. They spend little time focusing on the clarity of the why. Why we want something is the power source. If the why is large enough, the how becomes easy. We often focus on the wrong end of the equation. Why do you want to be financially independent? Why do you want to build a business to a large scale? Why do you want to be married and have children? Why do you want to lose weight? Why do you want the luxury house or second home? Why do you want to retire early?

I don’t think there are hundreds of whys in our life. I think we have a handful of whys that can interconnect to our goals and dreams. This small handful of whys create the power source in our life to become a good spouse, parent, child to older parents, business owner or employee. It helps us establish a legacy of service and love even after our journey on Earth is over.

A why can come from a past positive or a negative experience. There are thousands of stories of successful people who grew up in abject poverty, and that fueled their why. There are stories, like my own, where I grew up more privileged, and that also fueled the why. There is really no difference between the two pathways to the result. Each person taps into their unique why to power themselves to achievement to their desired life. The why can come from a desire to achieve the highest level of personal performance. Some people are motivated to excel, but the question is always, “Why?” Why do some have a passion for improvement and others don’t?

No one else can give you your why; you must discover it for yourself. As a coach, I can ask questions and guide clients to their unique set of whys. I can’t give them their why, though. That is one big value to having a coach in all the stages of your career, as they have the ability to help you draw out the whys buried inside of you. Your why can come from your envisioned future of your life and business. Your why can come from your love of another and the devotion and commitment you have for them in areas of your life.

I learned from my late friend, Jim Rohn, that life is not about what you acquire but what you become. We set goals to become the person we need to become to accomplish the goal. I had to become a different person to attract the success that I had in real estate sales. I've had to become a more skilled and more knowledgeable person to become a coach, speaker, and author. A specific example is that I had to become more disciplined to become the author of ten books and counting. As an author, you must be free to remove distractions, sit in the seat, and write, type, or speak your thoughts into words.

The important whys are like a magnet that pulls you to success. The more compelling the whys of your life, the more bumps in the road and adversity you will face. You might be asking, why more adversity? Because of the clarity, you recognize and are bothered by the distractions, and you are aware that they are taking you further way from your goals. A powerful why doesn’t remove the challenges; it just renders them to being less important. The clarity of why fires up your resolve to overcome any obstacle to achievement. You recognize the obstacles and your sense of urgency dispatches them.

The Different Categories of Success

Success can be evaluated through different lenses. I find that most people want to achieve their definition of success in these categories:

Health

Success in the health area of life means to be reasonably healthy and free of ailments, to be physically active, free of pain, and able to enjoy activities that require movemen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: Principles and Formulas for Success
• Part 2: Putting Together Your Success Plan
• Part 3: Achieving Optimum Health
• Part 4: Success Through Relationships
• Part 5: Success with Wealth and Money
• Part 6: The Time and Success Connection
• Part 7: The Part of Tens
• Index
• About the Author
• Connect with Dummies
• End User License Agreement