As my dear friend and mentor Greg Reid says, “turn your obstacles into opportunities.”
Well, most of us don’t do that. Most of us don’t have the persistence to make it. Greg talks about those mindsets in his book, “Three Feet from Gold.” Malcolm Gladwell talked about the paths to success in his bestseller “Outliers” and how hard work lay behind seemingly overnight success.
What is it that makes people give up? For some of us, it’s self-sabotage (many people are happier when they’re living the status quo, and dreaming of possibilities). For others, it’s an inability to follow through (the end is so near but you run out of breath).
More important, however, is to consider what lies behind success. For that, let’s go back and look at Napoleon Hill. He’s relevant, because Greg, who carries on the teachings of the Napoleon Hill Foundation, lives by Hill’s “think and grow rich” principles.
Napoleon Hill was a journalist (back in the days when that meant working for an actual newspaper) who was in the middle of a continuing assignment about writing profiles of famous men of his day (Hill lived a long life – from 1883 to 1970) when in 1908 he met the one who would have the greatest impact on his subsequent life. That man was the philanthropist, steel titan and businessman Andrew Carnegie.
Carnegie’s experience (he was then in his early 70s, and would live another 11 years) taught him that success came down to a simple formula. Cunningly, Carnegie didn’t reveal the formula, but suggested that Hill find out for himself, by interviewing or exploring the careers of some 500 successful men and women around the world. There was no pay for this enterprise – only out-of-pocket expenses.
Like any good budding entrepreneur, Hill took the bait. He interviewed some of the most prominent people in the world, whose fame has been enduring. They included Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt. Even Joseph Stalin.
Hill, cunning like his mentor, put these tantalizing interviews and his thoughts on them and success together in his mega-selling Think and Grow Rich, which sold tens of millions of copies since its publication in 1937, some quarter-century after Carnegie’s death. It took Hill a long time to synthesize what he’d found out, and to put all of his thoughts into book form. But again, like his mentor, while he stood his ground and forged ahead, he didn’t actually reveal the formula. He left that up to people to discover for themselves, based on the stories that he told.
I’m cunning enough, myself. But not quite as withholding as Carnegie or even his remarkable disciple Hill. Learn to identify the path to success, and how not only to identify the areas within yourself for growth, but how not to waver, no matter the obstacles.
