Throughout history, there have been plenty of successful people who’ve come and gone. They’ve devoted and dedicated their lives to their respective fields, set goals, failed many times over, and ultimately achieved their wildest dreams and then some. And while others say they want to get out there and accomplish something, when it comes down to taking action, their deeds don’t match their words.
So, what sets highly-successful people apart from the rest? What core habits have these people instilled into their minds, enabling them to attain lofty goals and become world-renowned for their achievements and accomplishments? There are, in fact, 6 core habits that these highly-successful people have ingrained into the neural pathways of their minds.
If you can replicate these 6 core habits, then achieving success in whatever endeavor you’re undertaking will be well within your grasp. Ignore these 6 core habits, and you’ll find getting there to be much harder, if not all but impossible.
#1 — They vividly envision the outcome of their goals
One of the core habits of a highly-successful person is their ability to vividly envision the outcome of their goals. Not only do they set goals the right way by writing them out on paper, but they’re also able to actually imagine what that goal would feel like in real life.
We can easily manifest into reality what we focus on, envision, and hold in our minds. When we can picture something so clearly, able to see it before us as if it were real, we can eventually attract that into our lives. This isn’t new-age mumbo jumbo; this is real and documented.
While some people brush off the ability to manifest their dreams, highly successful people know just how to wield the power of this tool and make it habitual. This is absolutely one of the most important core habits for people looking to achieve their dreams. If you can dream it, you can most certainly achieve it.
When J.K. Rowling recounted the story of how she came to write about Harry Potter and his initial adventures at the Hogwart’s School of Witchraft and Wizardy, she said, “I had the idea of a boy who was a wizard and didn’t yet know what he was. I never sat down and wondered, ‘What shall I write about next?’. It just came, fully formed.”
It took her 7 years from that initial idea in 1990 to a published book in 1997, and through that period she suffered countless losses. She had a daughter, got divorced, dealt with the death of her mother, and lived on welfare in the UK. Through that time, she held that vision of the boy wizard in her mind and didn’t give up on her dream. It’s that vision that helped her see things through.
#2 — They develop intricate plans to help them reach their goals
Part of what helps a successful person to succeed is their knack for planning. They have an uncanny ability to create a master plan to help them get from Point A to Point B. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they need to know every single step that they’ll take; they just create a plan detailed enough to give them a general sense of direction and they fill in the gaps along the way.
Planning is a prominent habit of highly-successful people. Not only do they create long-term plans, but they’re highly effective at planning their days as well. They know their outcome and use their know-how to effectively manage their time and create a list of MITs that helps them to move just a little bit closer to their goals every single day.
When an airplane takes off from one city to the next, it has a plan — a flight plan. That flight plan has an originating city and a destination. It also has a general speed, altitude, and direction of travel. It doesn’t account for every step or every mishap along the way. Turbulence, air-traffic congestion, and the like aren’t covered. But the plan is malleable enough to adapt.
Successful people adapt, not only to survive, but also to thrive. They use their plans as a tool to help guide them in the direction towards their goals. Along the way, when they run into problems, they revisit and revise their plan when necessary. They never change the vision, just the plan in order to reach their goals.
#3 — They’re highly adept at recognizing talent and leading
Highly successful people are leaders, able to enlist troves of others to follow their vision. However, in order to lead, they need to recognize talent first. They focus specifically on building their initial team. This skill for recognizing talent and leading comes from their habitual understanding of people and human nature.
They learn what drives others. They get to know their likes and dislikes. They’re able to get personal enough to lead others, sharing their vision along the way. Becoming a leader isn’t something that happens overnight, but it is a mindset and a habitual behavior that can easily become ingrained in someone who has enough passion and drive, and believes wholeheartedly in what they’re doing.
Steve Jobs was highly adept at leading. Some would say that he was a born leader, but that isn’t true. His early years were fraught with ups and downs. The son of a Syrian migrant, Jobs was later put up for adoption and even ended up dropping out of school. But, along the way, because of his vision, he became a leader.
That habit didn’t build quickly. It happened through trial and error. He recognized, for example, Steve Wozniak’s ability to build a product that just about everyone would want. He recognized that talent and used it to build a legendary team. But it was because of his initial vision that he was able to instill that leadership mindset into his habit repertoire.
#4 — They take action on a massive scale every single day without fail
Highly successful people take action every single day. They do a little bit at a time to move them closer to their goals. They don’t give up or take weeks or months off; they commit by moving forward every single day. Big goals aren’t achieved overnight, and anyone who thinks they can do it quickly can easily get discouraged when things don’t immediately go their way.
However, the bad habit of procrastination is what plagues most people, hindering their progress towards their goals. But highly successful people have learned to deal with the perils of procrastination, and have taken the reigns of their lives in order to push things forward.
While it might be hard to take action consistently, in order to succeed on a massive scale, just that is needed. And the person most famous for touting the necessity for taking action is Anthony Robbins, who has built an empire around this specific concept.
#5 — They’re resourceful and find solutions to problems standing in their way
Highly-successful people are extremely resourceful. They don’t give up, instead looking for solutions to whatever problems might be standing in their way. But resourcefulness is a habit that’s built up over time. We don’t always start out that way. But through failure, we learn just how to tap into the unlimited potential that we all have.
Clearly, the most difficult part of reaching any goal, are the stumbling blocks along the way. It’s staying extremely focused when so many things get you feeling down. But, highly successful people are able to see past that. They see the solutions, not the problems. When we move outside of the problems, objectively speaking, that’s when the real magic starts to happen.
The mind will always get whatever it is that it focuses on. If you train your mind to focus on the negative, that’s all that you’ll see. In turn, if you train your mind to focus on the positive, incredible things begin to happen. But, like anything else, this is a matter of conditioning. You have to condition your mind to be resourceful; it has to become habitual.
There are a number of ways to tap into your inner resourcefulness, but at the real basis of this is having a strong enough reason why you must accomplish your goals. Without that, everything else falls to the wayside. But if you have that, you’re certainly much closer than you might think.
#6 — They focus on long-term gain rather than the short-term pain
You’ve likely heard the saying that human beings do more to avoid pain than they do to gain pleasure. It’s an inherent construct in the human DNA. However, the pain-versus-pleasure paradigm is founded on the short term and not the long term. Highly successful people do more to avoid pain in the long term by moving past pain in the short term.
Rather than make excuses about doing their work or putting in the time to achieve something because it will mean sacrificing so much in the here-and-now, they do it by seeing the potential for pain in the long term if they don’t achieve their goals. They’re able to shift that pain-versus-pleasure paradigm into the long term and out of the short term.
Every highly successful person has been able to do this. It’s part of their inherent drive and determination to achieve their dreams. However, this isn’t an easy task. In order to focus on the long-term gain, we need to flip the script, so to speak. We have to change how we look at things, no matter what they are.
If we can shift that paradigm to where we’re driven more by the potential for long-term pain by not doing something, then we can ultimately achieve our dreams. But, as nearly everyone knows, this is an oftentimes-difficult task.