Success Is Your Duty

to approach it as a duty, obligation, and responsibility. I literally began to see success as an ethical issue—a duty to my family, company, and future—rather than as something that may or may not happen to me. I spent 17 years getting a formal education that was to prepare me for the world—and not one course was on success. Not once did anyone talk to me about the impor- tance of success, much less what I had to do in order to get it. Amazing! Years of education, information, hundreds of books, time in class, and money, yet I was still missing a purpose.

However, I was fortunate enough to have two distinct experiences in my life that served as major wake-up calls. My existence and survival were being seriously threatened in both cases. The first occurred when I was 25. My life was a piti- ful mess, caused by years of approaching life aimlessly, drift- ing with no real purpose or focus. I had no money, plenty of uncertainty, no direction, too much free time, and still hadn’t

made a commitment to approach success as an obligation. Had I not had this realization and gotten serious about my life, I don’t think I would be alive today. You know, you don’t need to grow old to die. I was dying at the age of 20 as a result of no direction and no purpose. At that time, I couldn’t hold a job, had surrounded myself with losers, was terminally hope- less, and if that weren’t enough, using drugs and alcohol on a daily basis. Had I continued on without a serious wake-up call, I would have continued to live a mediocre existence at best and probably much worse. Had I not committed to a life of success, I would not have identified my purpose and would have merely spent a lifetime fulfilling everyone else’s purpose. Let’s face it, there are plenty of people living mere existences, and I should know. At that time in my life, I was in sales and treated it with disdain. When I committed to sales as a career and then decided to do whatever I had to in order to become successful at selling, my life changed.

My second awakening took place at the age of 50, when the economy was going through the biggest contraction since the Great Depression. Literally every aspect of my life was being put at risk—as it was for billions of other individuals, companies, industries, and even entire economies. It became evident almost overnight that my company was not powerful enough in its sector, and its future was now in jeopardy. Addi- tionally, my financial well-being was being put in jeopardy. What others thought was tremendous financial wealth was now in danger as well. I remember turning on the TV one day and hearing reports about how unemployment numbers were increasing, wealth was being destroyed due to stock market and housing corrections, homes were being foreclosed on, banks were shutting down, and companies were being bailed out by the government. I realized then that I had put my family, my companies, and myself in a precarious situation because I had started to rest on my laurels and had discontinued approach- ing success as my duty, obligation, and responsibility. I had lost my focus and purpose.

At both of these pivotal points in my life, I woke up to the fact that success is important in order to have a full life. In the second case, I realized that greater quantities of success are necessary than most people calculate, and the continued pursuit of success should be approached not as a choice but as an absolute must.

Most people approach success in the same way that I did when I hadn’t committed to it. They look at it as though it doesn’t matter—like it’s an option or perhaps just something that only happens to other people. Others settle for just a little success, believing if they have a “little,” everything will be all right.

Treating success as an option is one of the major reasons why more people don’t create it for themselves—and why most people don’t even get close to living up to their full potential. Ask yourself how close you are to your full capability. You might not like the answer very much. If you don’t consider it your duty to live up to your potential, then you simply won’t. If it doesn’t become an ethical issue for you, then you won’t feel obligated and driven to fulfill your capacity. People don’t approach the creation of success as a must-have obligation, do-or-die mis- sion, gotta-have-it, “hungry-dog-on-the-back-of-a-meat-truck” mentality. They then spend the rest of their lives making excuses for why they didn’t get it. And that is what happens when you consider success to be an alternative rather than an obligation.

In my home, we consider success to be vital to our fam- ily’s future survival. My wife and I are on the same page with this; we meet often to talk about why it is so important and determine exactly what we have to do to keep secondary issues out of the way. I don’t just mean success in monetary terms but in every area—our marriage, health, religion, contributions to the community, and future—even long after we are gone. You have to approach the notion of success the way good parents approach their duty to their children; it’s an honor, an obliga- tion, and a priority. Good parents will do whatever it takes to take care of their children. They will get up in the middle of

the night to feed their baby, work as hard as they have to in order to clothe and feed their children, fight for them, even put their lives at risk to protect them. This is the same way you must envision success.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 747