Small Seeds to Success

Scott H Young wrote an article about success and I tend to agree with him.  He claims that “success is lumpy”.  By that he means that you don’t become a little more successful each day, but it comes in jumps.  You don’t receive a pay raise of $1 every day, you receive one large raise when you change jobs or are recognized for outstanding work.

Consistency is Key

After accepting what Scott says, I feel that it’s really important to emphasize the results from doing small things each day.  Keeping your house clean is easy if you spend 5 minutes each night tidying after the day’s activities.  Starting a small business is easy if you work on it for just an hour each night.  It is really hard (nearly impossible?) to say, “today I want a multimillion dollar business” and actually make it happen that day. It took years of practice until I was able to date such a beautiful woman that I now call my fiancee.  When you talk to a really successful person, you’ll find that he or she kept doing little things each and every day.  Some day a break comes and those who consistently put forth effort will be poised to take advantage of the opportunity.

Every day we are all presented with opportunities to become wealthy or gain whatever it is that we want.  Unfortunately most of us aren’t experienced enough to take advantage of the opportunities.  Even worse, I know there are a lot of people out there who are so far away they can’t even see the chance present itself.

Did you ever kick yourself for missing an opportunity you had years ago?  We can’t change the past and we can’t see into the future when it comes time to make a decision.  The only thing we can do is gain experience to prepare ourselves to make better decisions.  Someone could come to me and say, “Chris, I’m opening a new hotel.  I need partners who are willing to invest $1 million.”  I’d have to turn it down.  I don’t have anywhere close to $1 million and know nothing about large real estate investments.  Now if someone said to me, “Chris I’m about to buy a foreclosure for $5,000.  I need a partner to go in 50/50 with me.”  By now I own two houses and have a little cash saved up.  I’m ready to buy the foreclosure today.  You can bet that in 10 years, if I find the same opportunity to purchase a hotel, I’ll not only have the money but I’ll have a lot more experience with real estate to help me make smart decisions.  Could you imagine if I bought a hotel today?  I’d probably run it into the ground because I don’t know a thing about managing that sort of asset.

Harvest

The fun part of success is when all of your seeds begin to sprout.  Eventually you’ll be so busy scooping up opportunities that you’ll consciously leave some behind.  Imagine if you were fresh out of college with so many job offers already that you decide to start canceling interviews for no other reason than that the company didn’t seem that into you.  How successful would you feel?  Limitless opportunities do find people for those who have made the opportunities happen.  Knowing you can pass on the good things because you already have too many great things is one more step towards infinite happiness.