In the 1920′s and 30′s,  a young journalist  called Napoleon Hill, interviewed 500 of the most successful people in America. He found that people who create success have many things in common. These are some of them as described in his best-selling book, “Think and Grow Rich”

1. Decide what you want. Desire is the starting point of all achievement. Desire is a crazy mad emotion that you absolutely have to satisfy, not a rational reasoned argument for doing something.

2. Believe that you can get what you want. Self doubt will prevent you from taking action. No-one is born with a sense of what they can’t do. Limiting beliefs are learned and they can and must be unlearned. It is usually easier to overcome other people’s judgements than our own.

3. You don’t have to do it all yourself. As Mother Teresa famously told Bob Geldof, “I can’t do what you do and you can’t do what I do but together we can change the world.” Surround yourself with people who can do what you can’t and who respect you for what you can do. Start or join a  MasterMind Group with like minded people.

4. Make practical use your imagination. Work out how to turn your dreams into reality. Everything, everything, starts out as an idea. Ideas are the beginning point of all achievement but they need to be harnessed into practical action.

5. Create a plan, organise your ideas and take continuous action. Most people put more effort into planning a holiday than planning their life. Successful people don’t just react to things that happen to them, they question whether something will take them closer to their goal before acting on it or rejecting it.

6. Avoid procrastination and make decisions. The ability to make decisions comes back to understanding exactly what it is that you want, to the burning desire and definite purpose that underpins all achievement. Successful people in all walks of life decide quickly and firmly and the world has a habit of making room for the person who knows where they are going and why.

7. Persist. Things will go wrong, people will let you down. If your desire is strong enough you will find a way through all difficulties to achieve your desire. Don’t keep doing the same things and expecting different results. Find different ways to achieve your goals. Paulo Coelho was committed to a mental asylum by his parents three times and subjected to electro-convulsive therapy because they thought he must be mad to want to become a writer instead of a lawyer. He persisted and his book, The Alchemist, sold over 40 million copies.

8. Aquire power and learn how to use it. The ability to lead others in a spirit of harmony to achieve a definite objective is a major source of success but successful people say that personal power and self mastery are most important.

9. Understand that sex is the most powerful of human desires. When this desire is harnessed into a creative process it can be the source of genius. It can also be a huge temptation and has destroyed many great people.  Successful people say that they are able to transmute its power into a creative force that helps them to produce and action ideas that in many instances makes their fortunes.

10. Learn to use the power of the subconscious mind. Everything we have ever experienced is kept in the vast storehouse of our sub-conscious. It can work for or against us but when we learn how to harness this power it makes us unstoppable. What we think of the world and ourselves makes us not only who we are but who we can be.

11. Develop and learn to trust the ‘sixth sense’. Intuition can help us to avoid dangers and grasp opportunities. Intuition is part of our nature and many successful people admit that intuition is a big part of their success including Donald Trump, Oprah, Richard Branson and even Bill Gates. Einstein and Edison described their creative process as having original ideas that didn’t come from the rational foundation of the mind. Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine, says, ‘The intuitive mind tells the logical mind where to look next.’

12. Deal with fear, the major obstacle to achievement. Almost every feeling of fear we experience is as the result of an IMAGINED situation, not a real one. In almost every case, the imagined situation that we most fear never happens. When a situation that we had feared actually materialised, most of us deal with it without any real consequences. The only thing holding most people back is their own imagination!

Is it ever too late to do the things you once dreamed of doing?

Mary Wesley, best-selling author, took up writing at 70

Charles Darwin’s first book wasn’t published until he was in his 50’s

Colonel Sanders was in this 60’s when he franchised Kentucky Fried Chicken

Ray Kroc was in his 50’s when he launched McDonalds

Agatha Christie was 62 when she wrote The Mousetrap

Julia Child was 50 before she took up cooking professionally

Benjamin Franklin was 78 when he invented bifocals.

Life expectancy has doubled in the last 100 years. There is no longer an official retirement age. If you go to college at 40 and qualify at 45 you could still have half your life left to work at what you love. It’s never too late to become an achiever instead of a dreamer!

"No Hands" by Adam Hawkins http://anodizeproductions.com

Should you set big fat hairy audacious goals or stick to the reasonable, more easily achieved variety?

Many interviews with highly successful people reveal that they set themselves huge goals, fired by a burning desire to achieve something specific and that these goals determine their direction and purpose in life and colour all their decisions and actions.

They also freely admit that when they set these goals it’s usually without any clear idea of how to achieve them.

 

What they do have however,  is an unwavering belief that they CAN.

What happens is that when a goal excites you enough, you start to live every day in a way that makes it possible to achieve it and obstacles don’t seem so daunting. Setting reasonable goals rarely leads to that sense of excitement so there isn’t the same incentive to overcome obstacles and the goals  just becomes another “so what?”

All great achievements begin with an idea, a want, a longing, a desire.

While she was still Posh Spice, Victoria Adams said she wanted to be “more famous than Persil”. As Mrs Victoria Beckham she got her desire but many of our wants and longings never get past the wishing and dreaming stage.

If you’ve ever had your dream laughed at, if you’ve been told to ‘get real’, keep your feet on the floor, your shoulder to the wheel and your nose to the grindstone (ouch!) you’ve probably let go of that dream and it may now be just a vague longing.

How would you feel if you re-ignited that flame? What’s stopping you from blowing on the coals of your burning desire and setting off on an adventure of achievement?

My guess is, that interfering with your thinking, your determination and your belief is a very small word called FEAR.  It may be fear of failure, fear of success or simply a series of “what if’s?”

Fear is a tricky emotion. Most of the people who have achieved big fat hairy audacious goals say that the magnitude of what they were trying to achieve scared them – but they did it anyway.

If you knew that you could not possibly fail, what would you attempt?

We all know that sex sells almost everything and that PR and Marketing people are always talking about making messages sexy.

This can only work because sex is something most of us find interesting. If it wasn’t interesting, none of these sexy messages would work on us.

For many people sex has become a dirty word; a powerful and entirely natural human instinct has been exploited and used to make money and in the process has been degraded and made to appear shameful. This leads to a conflict. Sex is something we can’t help but be interested in and yet in most ‘polite’ societies it is not generally acknowledged as anything linked openly to success.

In the 1930s Napoleon Hill interviewed 500 of the most successful multi-millionaires in America. He found that people who create success have many things in common, one of which is a high sex drive, but the really interesting thing is how they described the extra edge this gave them.

Instead of using this most powerful of human drives simply as nature intended, these successful people all said that they were able to transmute its power into a creative force that helped them to produce and action ideas that in many instances made their fortunes.

While a high sex drive may or may not lead to determined action it is widely acknowledged that castration has the opposite effect in most species.

Controlling our urges

Sex and Money AdamHawkins anodizeproductions.com

Most of us have heard the debates about whether sports coaches allow their stars to have sex before a game or a match, many believing that the energy and passion associated with having sex can be transmuted and give their subjects a winning edge. While there is no conclusive proof that this happens, what is interesting is the discipline associated with not simply giving in to passions but in channelling thoughts and actions to a desired outcome.

Napoleon Hill cites George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, William Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Burns, Thomas Jefferson, Oscar Wilde, Woodrow Wilson, Andrew Jackson and Enrico Caruso as examples of people with a high sex drive who used it to great creative effect if not always in the disciplined way the subjects of his study describe.

The attitudes we have to sex in today’s media frenetic society may explain why not many high achievers in the modern world are keen to attribute their success to the same source but it is easy to find examples where the same drive that leads to great creativity is also used in a destructive fashion and families, businesses, fortunes and even countries have been destroyed as a result.

Sexy by Adam hawkins http://anodizeproductions.com

Women’s sexuality

Hill’s observation that the way women use their sex drive primarily to influence men is very controversial in the 21st Century and there are lots of double standards and hypocrisy about women’s sexuality. There are more examples of high achieving women now than when Napoleon Hill interviewed the subjects of his study but still no where the same number as high achieving men. Most studies suggest that this is more likely to be a result of social, political and economic factors than anything to do with sex drive or ambition.

Despite the fact that the media seems intent on reporting that high achieving women have miserable relationships and disappointing sex lives, these reports are not supported by any real evidence. One recent piece of research that proves just the opposite is a study of 500 couples that found that the highest levels of sexual satisfaction were among couples who both worked and experienced high rewards from their jobs.

If success is intricately linked to transmuting a high sex drive into taking action to bring creative ideas into being, how can it be used by a wide range of people? Given that sex is the most powerful driver in most human beings and most of the time is controlled rather than given free rein, we must all be transmuting our sex drive in some way. Perhaps the fascination with celebrity sex lives and soap operas is simply a voyeuristic way of indulging what we deny ourselves.

Sex and Creativity

Play by Adam Hawkins AnodizeProductions.com

Creative expression takes many forms and is another way of transmuting this powerful force but whether it is in creating a garden, an empire or a fortune there is no doubt that it is there for us to use and the only difference is in scale and both talent and ambition are an essential part of this.

So, the key to using sex as part of our formula for success is, as in most other things, discipline. Unfortunately, this had become another dirty word to many and history is littered with stories of successful and creative people who destroyed themselves because they lost control and allowed sudden passions to overtake their better judgement. The successful people that Hill interviewed all knew how to control their thoughts and desires and they consistently used all of their resources to take them closer to their goals.

To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded. (Poem often attributed to Emerson but most likely to have been written by Bessie Stanley)

What do YOU think? Is the ability to use our sex drive creatively a major part of success in today’s world? Leave a comment below – I’d love to hear some other opinions on this.

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The other common factors in success that Napoleon Hill identified are:

• Define your sense of purpose and all-consuming goal
• Create the self confidence and belief that you can achieve what you desire
• Acquire the specialized knowledge that will achieve your goal
• Outwit the ghosts of fear
• Make practical use of your imagination
• Use organised planning to put desire into action
• Master procrastination and make decisions
• Develop persistence and overcome obstacles
• Acquire and learn how to use power
• Understand the role of sex in success
• Learn how to control the subconscious mind
• Develop your sixth sense to avoid dangers and grasp opportunities.