Bill Collier- I have achieved some level of “success” in life, namely, I work for myself at home making better than upper middle class income doing things that are my passion most of the time. There is great harmony between what pays me and what I genuinely enjoy doing.
I say this to make the point that what I am about to share isn’t theory. It isn’t pop psychology. These five secrets to what success I have experienced were learned, used, and refined over decades and have served me well.
Briefly, the five secrets are: make relationships the brass ring of your life, be willing to say yes to things you aren’t sure you can do, always hustle smartly not just through activity, make others profit off of you not just you from them, and learn to use charisma and charm effectively but never manipulate!
If you only do these things to gain profit or if you start doing them and expect immediate results, you will likely fail and be disappointed. These secrets to success are colored by an overarching understanding that success is about time, stamina, and chance.
Nothing guarantees success. You can do all the right things and success can elude you. Over time, if you persist, you will get more and more opportunities, each new opportunity being a new roll of the dice, a new opportunity, to get that good contract or promotion or what have you. But in doing this, you must also have stamina: the longer you can keep at it day after day, the greater the odds are you will remain standing when that opportunity arrives.
This approach basically acknowledges that time, stamina, and chance make it probable that the odds will even out and favor you eventually. You are the house in this case and the house almost always wins.
Of course there are other things too, not covered in this brief essay, related to finding the inner push of your life and aligning that in a realistic way with market demands while doing the necessary qualifying things so you can function in the arena of your choice. If your inner push is to be an electrician, you will need an education and licensing, for instance, but you will also want to live in an area where demand for you is good.
Finally, and this is also important, whatever you do, you should focus on a portable skill, something you can do that others will pay for and that you can do on your own for anyone, anywhere, who needs it. If your skill is operating a factory machine, that’s not portable, you can only do that there. Perhaps you should learn how to be a handyman and offer services to your neighbors on the side, as an example.
Now, back to the four secrets.
The first is to make relationships the brass ring in life. Cultivating and maintaining good and close relationships with multiple people is a powerful way to ensure many new opportunities and ideas always come your way. But it’s not about that: when things aren’t great materially, you will find satisfaction and happiness in your relationships.
To be a friend, the Bible teaches us, you must show yourself friendly. Learn whay friendship means and how to cultivate relationships, set healthy boundaries, give both reciprocally and unconditionally, and to show and accept philial and agape love.
I can say, in the course of any week, I hear and/or say “I love you” from multiple people who are like kin to me. This is, to me, the greatest measure of success in life, the true brass ring.
I don’t pursue relationships for any reason but that they are in and of themselves rewarding. But, at the same time, my network of close friends, which is over a dozen people, is also the primary reason why I consistently have new opportunities to sell my portable skills.
Again, be very careful! I did not start pursuing relationships as a means to an end, I genuinely value relationships. I try to keep them alive and enjoy them as something of intrinsic value. I have friends who constantly share opportunities with me but also many who work in totally different arenas who cannot provide me any opportunities, but that hasn’t meant those relationships aren’t valuable to me.
I am picky about who remains in my circle, I avoid anyone who tends to be negative, who tends to be transactional, and who doesn’t always have high ethics or show good intentions.
Be willing to say yes to things you aren’t sure you can do, but that align more of less with your core skills.
I was once asked if I could lobby for a specific cause. I knew the basic idea and it would require skills like charisma and speaking well along with political strategy. But I had never lobbier formally. So I said yes because I knew there were experts I did know and books I could read quickly.
I speed read books on the legal ins and outs, got a piece of software on public relations templates, talked to some experts I was referred to by a friend, and within a few days launched a successful lobbying effort.
Being willing to say yes to what you cannot do is predicated on being able to learn quickly, being able to connect to experts, and knowing that for most things anyone wants to pay you there are people who already provide such services. I don’t say yes to things I cannot immediately do if I don’t have these things, but some of my most lucrative moments have come from things I had to access learning materials, experts, and outside providers to do.
Always hustle smartly and not just through activity!
I have been involved in sales where activity became the benchmark of meeting goals. Smart people didn’t focus on the number of calls or door knocks, they looked for ways to automate the process, maybe through fliers or ads or holding events.
Ask yourself how you are making money and where. If your profession and the things you love doing aren’t needed in your town, consider moving. If you you are doing laborious tasks to make sales, what can you do to increase your exposure smartly so leads come to you?
It is somewhat of a myth that “hard work pays off.” Smart work done with gusto, diligence, and intensity pays off over time. Be excellent, be smart, and be efficient. Always ask others who know better what this means and how to do it and submit your work to criticism to make adjustments. Use accountability to others to motivate and inspire you.
Make others profit from you, and not just you them, and you will never absolutely lack for opportunities.
There are people every week calling me to help them with projects. Some simply use my services as a white label of their own, some get commissions for the referral, and most use my services to leverage their own knowing they can’t get the full deal without having what I provide.
I am generous with my time, I help people without getting paid and am transparent with how they can do things I do on their own. This is part of being relational. I did this because I care for my friends and want to help, and yet in the process I found that doing this demonstrated my skills and made that person more likely to engage my services or ask me to help them with a project.
People have profited from my work and my services immensely. And without this, I would not constantly have a chance that the phone rings and what seemed like a every unprofitable month becomes very profitable overnight. Be generous with others, make sure they profit from using your services or products, make sure you benefit them materially as much as possible.
This last one is harder to define. It is to learn and use your charisma and charm without being manipulative. If you are using charisma and charm to get someone to do things that benefit you and not themselves, then you are a creep and a user. Invest in others, always, even without a return, and never let them benefit you solely without rewarding them and considering their needs.
Charisma and charm are necessary ingredients to success. Research them, learn them, practice them. Not everyone has as much charisma and charm as others, but everyone has some and there is a range of improvement you can gain through skills training and practice.
Think of these things, charisma and charm, as skills. Learn what they are. Find people, books, or courses about how to exercise charisma and how to be charming, which is in part learning good manners and protocol for your area of expertise or profession and the community of people in your life.
These are five secrets to success.
Now some will say they just can’t do all of any of these. Some people are happy and content without a huge level of income and influence, they may never need to be doing these things. Others who want more influence and income should know that unless you can do all of these things, you cannot realistically expect to succeed.
